Bun Kebab: Pakistan's Iconic Street Food | Passport Kitchen | Epicurious

Shami kebabs are made in every household in Pakistan. Everybody does it a little bit differently, adds a little bit of their own touch to it. Just a really great way of bringing Pakistani cuisine right into your kitchen. My name is Fatima, I'm from Lahore, Pakistan, and this is how you make bun kebabs. Bun kebabs traditionally are two soft buns, and then you've got lots of mystery chutneys, and then you have your shami kebab, you have an egg, some sort of salad, or a vegetable on top. So here I'm gonna start showing you how to make the shami kebab that would go into a bun kebab. Pakistani cooking is very commonly cooked on very high heat. It's always kind of alarming to me about how high the heat is, and there's chicken just like simmering under a super high flame. And then I'm gonna go right in with the minced chicken. We're gonna add our soaked chana dal, which are basically split chickpeas. After that, I'm gonna add ginger and garlic paste, which is kind of the foundation of Pakistani cooking. We add ginger garlic paste, turmeric, red chili powder, to almost all of our cooking. And now I'm gonna add the spices. There is red chili powder, coriander seed, cumin seeds, one small stick of cinnamon, one pod of green cardamom, some cloves, and black peppercorns. You sometimes might see an extra spice here or there, but this is what we do at my house. I'm gonna add the water here. It's quite a bit of water because you want the chicken to cook through and you want to tenderize the lentils that have only been soaked for an hour or two. This is a little bit of an unusual technique of adding just meat and lentils together and just cooking it and then just processed. This technique kind of simplifies it. The bun kebab is the Pakistani version of a hamburger, commonly eaten on the street, but it has made its way into people's homes. People make it at home all the time for tea or as a snack or even as a side protein, almost like a chicken sausage, to have with breakfast. So this is gonna cook for about 30 to 45 minutes, but you really want it to cook all the way down. You want all of that water to evaporate. And you actually want your mixture to start sticking to the bottom of the pan. That's when you know that it's completely done and dry. So this is looking great now. Everything is cooked through and there's no more water and it has started to stick to the bottom of the pan. You can tell, because you can actually fish out even a chana dal and it kind of smushes right into between your fingers. You could also just smash it against the side of the pan to see if it's cooked through. We're gonna go ahead and start to process this. These are gonna be the fresh elements that we're gonna add to our shami kebab. The onion is this wonderful, raw, fresh, biting element that's gonna go into a now pretty cooked down creamy mixture. Next, I'm gonna pick this cilantro. When I first moved to the U.S., I had never seen sage before. I had never been introduced to any of these Western herbs. Cilantro and green chilies are something that your produce guy will give to you for free. When you go to buy onions and tomatoes, he's gonna add like a bunch of cilantro and chilies. In Pakistan, you would just call this hari mirch, which translates to green chili. And there's just this one chili that you find all over in the market that is used commonly for fragrancing and spicing food. The chicken and the dal mixture has cooled down. I'm gonna remove the lard cinnamon stick first. It's not gonna break down as easily. You can leave all the other whole spices in there and process it until it's a paste. I'm gonna transfer that mixture to a bowl, add the onions, the chilies, and the cilantro so they're still a bit whole and not broken down. The reason that we precook the meat is so that you can process it and create that creamy texture that shami kebab is iconic for. I'm gonna add one egg right in. You don't necessarily have to beat it first. The egg will hydrate and help the mixture bind together. I'm gonna start forming them into quarter-cup patties. You can make them as big, as small as you want. Shami kebabs are never too big or too small. Just lightly press down into little hockey pucks. I formed these, and we're gonna chill them for about 10 to 15 minutes in the refrigerator, and then they'll be ready to fry. We have our frying pan set up with oil, about quarter of an inch of oil. While this is heating up, I'm gonna crack an egg or two, depending on how many you're gonna fry at a time. Before I start to shallow fry the shami kebabs, I'm gonna dip them in the egg wash. You have to get that nice craggly kind of crisp. It's also considered to be an iconic part of a shami kebab. So it should start to, like, sizzle and crack a little bit, and you can see that the egg is starting to kind of scramble around the edges and cook. The street vendors that you see in Pakistan usually have a very large frying pan. In Urdu, we call those tawas, that they can do multiple things at. So they might be making the shami kebab on one side, they might be making the omelet on one side, and might be doing something else on the other side. So it's a multi-purpose, very large tawa that sits on a cylinder burner. Okay, these are done. You can smell all those, like, spices, and the cilantro has gotten a little bit toasty and fried in the oil also. So now that the shami kebabs are fried and ready to go, we're gonna go ahead and start assembling our bun kebabs. So for our anda shami, I'm gonna toast the buns in some butter. The anda shami sandwich actually has a couple of different names that I might have used today. There's the anda shami, which means, anda means egg, so anda shami sandwich. Then there's bun kebab, which is also a different name for it. And then, hilariously, in the city that I'm from, they call it kutta burger also, which translates to dog burger. I don't know where that name comes from, but I find it hilarious. While those are toasting, I can actually start scrambling some eggs. You don't have to season these eggs, just because there's so much going on with the shami kebab and the chutneys that are gonna go on top. And you're just gonna pour your eggs into your pan and not touch it. And you're almost making a flat egg pancake, and you're gonna get them brown on both sides to then fold up and put in your sandwich. You don't have to be too precious about it. You can start to see that you were getting a little bit of color on the egg, which is a good sign. The jury's out on how to eat a shami kebab. People are gonna put them together differently depending on the street vendor, what city you're in, the chutneys, the sauces, the salad that's gonna go on top. I'm gonna give it to you the way that I like it. Don't come at me. The bottom bun with mayonnaise. I'm gonna do my bun kebab on top, and then the make it or break it egg. I might fold this a little bit more so it fits perfectly on top. And then I'm gonna do raw onion. I have a bottle of tamarind chutney at home, so I've been doing the tamarind chutney on top. Some people compare it to like Pakistani ketchup. Not as sweet, though. A lot more like sourness. And then the bun just goes right on top. The green sauce can either go on the side or you can put on top. I'm gonna do it on the side, because I like dipping. And then you can also do this and ketchup. So there's a lot of ways to play the game. Here's a cross section of our beautiful bun kebab. It's way neater than the way that the guys in the streets make it. We're gonna take a bite. I'm gonna dip mine in the green chutney. Might be messy. The first thing I get is a little bit of spice. I love that raw onion. It really breaks it. You've got that creaminess from the shami kebab. You've got a little bit of like that spongy, creamy texture from the egg. And then warm bun. It makes me think of just casual eating. Food that is unfussy, but full of flavor and full of textures and still really complex, but it's also basic street food that you can buy for, you know, a dollar now. This is a really great way of bringing Pakistani food to your dining table. Just a few steps, a few elements. So this is a kind of nice way of like just getting in there and tasting a bite from my home.