Turkish raw meatballs - çiğ köfte

1. Turkish raw meatballs - çiğ köfte çiğ köfte (raw meat pill), a traditional food of Armenians, Kurds and Turks, used to appear during special celebrations or festivals, but now it is almost a snack everywhere in Turkey. (çiğ in Turkish means raw, and köfte means meatball) Original çiğ köfte is more like a kind of meze (appetizer), but now there are çiğ köfte's franchise stores everywhere have basically turned it into not just a small dish, but a staple food. Traditional çiğ köfte is based on ground beef or mutton, seasoned with some vegetables (onions, tomatoes, green onions, Brazil, green peppers, mint leaves, etc.) and many spices, and finally sprinkled with lemon juice But in recent years, the çiğ köfte with meat adding is hardly existing (unless you make it yourself), because meat is not easy to preserve, especially raw meat is easy to produce bacteria at room temperature (although the traditional practice is to use fresh freshly slaughtered meat and can't be kept overnight, it will still give people health concerns anyway), so Turkish law later stipulated çiğ köfte can no longer use raw meat, so it is basically the çiğ köfte that can be seen on the market now is a vegetarian version. Even though its name is still raw meatball, there is no raw meat in it. The original meat has been replaced by ground walnuts, hazelnuts and potatoes. çiğ köfte's eating method is very simple. It can be pinched into a small ball (a small strip) and sandwiched in lettuce. It can also be flattened and wrapped directly with lettuce in a roll. Natives eat çiğ köfte also loves ayran (salty yogurt), which is said to neutralize the spicy taste of çiğ köfte (however, Turks have to match ayran with everything they eat, so I don't think it has anything to do with spicy or not). If you pay attention, you can see the çiğ köfte on the advertising picture has a very strange shape, one by one. In fact, they are all made with fingers. They may be able to detect fingerprints when they are tested (kidding, in fact, the people who pinch them now wear gloves, at least the people who sell them, and I don't know whether the people who make them wear them). However, I heard that the chain stores are made of machines Asked my local friends if they will make their own çiğ köfte at home, he said yes. Many people will make it by themselves, but the recipes are different. A really tasteful çiğ köfte I ate was in aspuzu çiğköfte, a restaurant in Ankara. Some people will add raw meat at home, but some people won't. He said he doesn't like adding meat. A few months ago, I was invited to a native friend's home, who made çiğ köfte with homemade methods to entertain us. It really tastes different from those sold outside. Personally, I think homemade is more to my taste. I have a native friend loves to eat çiğ köfte, he can't help buying it every time he see it. One winter a few years ago, we were walking on an Istanbul road. He suddenly turned into a small alley. It's really a small alley. Take a closer look, it's a fire lane at all. I was still thinking about why he ran to the fire lane, but suddenly I saw a group of people standing in line there? What's so attractive? In those days, the weather was so cold that there was still a lot of snow on the road. What did these people stand in line to buy on a cold day? When I looked closer, I found that it turned out to be a selling çiğ köfte's stall. They really started business in the fire lane? Later, I found out (i was really discovered after looking at the photos a few years later) that the place I had mistakenly thought was a fire lane was actually a thin and long store with a width of less than one meter. It can be said that there were only two or three small spaces with no decoration at all, not even a seat. It could not be seen that it was a store, Not to mention a restaurant selling food (it's a little far fetched to say

2. that the restaurant can only be regarded as a small stall with a store at most), but those çiğ köfte in front of me really piled up into a hill. When the boss saw me as a foreigner, he was also very enthusiastic and immediately made me a sample wrapped in lettuce. I could only take it with a smile. In fact, that was not the first time I ate çiğ köfte, my friend bought it for me before, but I never liked it very much, and in this cold winter, I'd rather have a bowl of hot soup or some kind of hot food than this cold spicy ball.