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Kabab Karaz

كباب كرز, Aleppo

🇸🇾 Syria Mains easy 30 min prep · 40 min cook serves 4 1 hr 40 min start to table ~600 kcal per serving surprise

Lamb meatballs simmered in hot cherry sauce and piled onto torn flatbread. It reads like a jam accident. In Aleppo it is the dish you cook when the sour cherries come in.

The washna cherries grown around Aleppo are properly sour, so the sauce behaves like any wine or pomegranate reduction: acid and fruit sugars glazing rich lamb. Cinnamon and seven spice sit naturally with both meat and fruit, the bread underneath drinks the juices, and toasted pine nuts add back some crunch and fat.

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The story

Aleppo sat on the Silk Road for centuries, and its kitchen is famous for exactly this kind of confident fruit-and-meat cooking. Kabab karaz, the cherry kebab, is the city's signature, built on small, intensely sour washna cherries from the surrounding orchards, harvested for a few weeks in early summer.

It is festive food, cooked when the cherries arrive in June and for weddings and family gatherings the rest of the year using preserved fruit; the city's Armenian community claims a proud share of its history. War scattered Aleppo's cooks, and the dish now appears wherever the Syrian diaspora landed, from Beirut to Berlin, usually made with frozen or jarred sour cherries.

Fair warning: Made with ordinary sweet cherries it slides into dessert territory and disappoints; genuinely sour cherries are the whole dish.
The recipe

Ingredients

  • 500 g (about 1 lb) ground lambnot too lean, around 15 to 20 percent fat
  • 1 small onion, gratedsqueeze out the excess juice
  • 1 tsp seven spice (baharat)or ground allspice
  • 1.5 tsp ground cinnamon, dividedhalf for the meat, half for the sauce
  • 1.5 tsp salt, divided
  • 600 g (about 1.3 lb) pitted sour cherriesfresh, frozen, or jarred morello; not sweet cherries
  • 120 ml (1/2 cup) waterskip if using jarred cherries in their juice
  • 2 to 3 tbsp sugarto taste; jarred cherries in syrup may need none
  • 1 tbsp pomegranate molassesoptional, deepens the sauce
  • 1 squeeze lemon juiceif the sauce needs sharpening
  • 1 tbsp olive oil or butterfor browning
  • 2 pita or other flatbreads
  • 2 tbsp pine nuts, toasted
  • small handful flat-leaf parsley, chopped

Method

  1. Knead the lamb with the grated onion, seven spice, half the cinnamon, and half the salt until it comes together like a paste.
  2. Chill the mixture for 30 minutes so the meatballs hold their shape.
  3. Roll into small balls, a little bigger than a walnut.
  4. Brown them in the oil over medium-high heat, in batches if needed, and set aside; they finish cooking in the sauce.
  5. In the same pan, simmer the cherries with the water, the remaining cinnamon and salt, and 2 tablespoons of sugar for 15 to 20 minutes, crushing a few against the side, until loose and saucy.
  6. Taste and adjust: more sugar if it is punishing, lemon if it is flabby, pomegranate molasses if you want a darker edge.
  7. Return the meatballs with any juices and simmer 10 minutes, turning once, until cooked through and glazed.
  8. Toast the flatbreads, tear them into pieces, and line a warm platter.
  9. Spoon the meatballs and sauce over the bread so it soaks.
  10. Finish with pine nuts, parsley, and a light dusting of cinnamon, and serve immediately with plain yogurt alongside.
Shopping notes
Jarred or frozen pitted sour (morello) cherries are the practical route, sold at Eastern European, Turkish, and Middle Eastern groceries and many supermarkets; dried sour cherries soaked in hot water also work. If sweet cherries are truly all you have, cut the sugar to zero and lean hard on lemon and pomegranate molasses.
Cross-checked against: mounaskitchen.com · tastecooking.com · washingtonpost.com
Kitchen notes

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