Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.

Nicholas Gavin

In Turkey, adana kebabs are a point of national pride. Rightly so, since they’re super delicious: hand-minced lamb, fortified with extra fat, seasoned with fresh sweet red peppers (also hand chopped) and salt, molded onto flat metal skewers, and grilled over oak. Those qualities are all non-negotiable, since adana kebabs are protected by a designation of origin with <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110903072459/http://www.adana-to.org.tr/tr/kebap/talimat.htm">specific prescriptions for how they’re supposed to be prepared</a>.Our adana kebabs aren’t made from a 1-year-old sheep that grazed on the indigenous flora of southeastern Turkey, but they are made with lamb we grind ourselves. And we tried to stay true to spirit of the way the official ones are made, limiting the seasoning to fresh and dried chiles for fruity flavor, smokiness, and peppery bite and a little sumac and cumin for floral and earthy notes to complement the fatty meat.The key to making the kebabs is letting the meat mixture chill after mixing and after you’ve molded it onto the skewers. As the meat rests in the refrigerator, the salt starts unwinding the meat proteins, dissolving myosin present in the meat to form a gel. That gel helps the meat to stick together, and it helps to bind water and fat, which yields a juicier kebab.They won’t pass the sniff test at the next Adana Chamber of Commerce audit of official adana kebabs, but they’ll pass your these-are-the-best-kebabs-I’ve-ever-eaten-in-a-backyard test with flying colors.

Adana Kebab (Turkish Ground Lamb Kebabs)