Adana Kebab in the UK: what it is, how to order it, where to find it

What Adana kebab is

The genuine article is made from lamb shoulder and tail fat minced by hand with a curved knife, the zırh, until it is a coarse paste, then mixed with red pepper flakes and salt and nothing else. The mixture is pressed along a skewer two or three centimetres wide so the kebab is long, flat and ridged from the cook's fingers. It cooks over charcoal and is served on lavash bread with grilled tomato, long green pepper and onion with sumac and parsley. The pepper should be Turkish red pepper, sweet with a slow heat, not chilli; the original is spicy but not hot. Urfa kebab is the same thing made without the pepper flakes, for people who want the texture without the heat.

What UK restaurants do differently

Most UK kitchens use a machine mince and add garlic, cumin, onion or parsley to the mixture, which Adana purists would not recognise but which suits the British taste for a bigger flavour. Many make it much hotter than the original. The result is a good kebab that is not quite Adana, and the only way to know what you are getting is to ask whether the meat is hand-minced. A few ocakbaşı houses in North London still do it by hand and charge more for it, and it is worth the difference: the texture is looser and juicier, and the fat renders into the meat rather than dripping out.

How to judge it

A good Adana is juicy enough to stain the bread it sits on, has visible char along the ridges, and holds its shape on the skewer without being dense. It should taste of lamb and pepper with the smoke behind. Dry, tightly packed, uniformly grey Adana was made from lean machine mince and overcooked. The bread underneath matters: lavash that has soaked the juices and been warmed on the grill is half the dish. In our directory, restaurants with 'ocakbaşı' or 'mangal' in the name score consistently higher for grilled kebabs than general Turkish restaurants.

Where in the UK it is done well

Hand-minced Adana is a North London speciality: the older ocakbaşı houses of Green Lanes, Stoke Newington and the Hertford Road in Enfield. Birmingham's eastern corridor has a strong cluster of grill houses run by families from the south-east of Turkey. The ranking below counts Turkish restaurants in our directory whose name signals Adana or a charcoal grill.