Monday, June 21, 2010

Doner Kebab?

Recently I have found a heavenly food called a Doner Kebab.  I pretty sure the little Turkish man who prepares these tasty delicacies sprinkles crack in the meat for assured repeat business.  I believe you must know the history of the Doner before I unveil an image to the world.

Doner kebab (Turkish: doner kebap or doner kebabı, literally "rotating roast", often abbreviated as doner, also spelled donair, donar, doner, or sometimes donner), is a Middle Eastern dish made of lamb meat (or so I have been told) cooked on a vertical spit and sliced off to order. Two similar dishes are called shawarma in Arabic and gyros in Greek, although ingredients and sauces differ. The English term kebab in some countries refers specifically to doner kebab.

Before taking its modern aspect, as mentioned in Ottoman Travelbooks of the 18th century,the döner used to be a horizontal stack of meat rather than vertical, probably sharing common ancestors with the Cağ Kebabı of the Eastern Turkish province of Erzurum.  In a Biography, İskender Efendi from the 19th century Bursa claims that "he and his grandfather had the idea of roasting the lamb vertically rather than horizontally, and invented for that purpose a vertical mangal". With time, the meat took a different marinade, got leaner, and eventually took its modern shape. The modern fast food doner was invented by Mahmut Aygun, a Turkish immigrant in Berlin, in 1971.



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