When Yalçın Tasdelen wields his zirh—a weighty 2-foot-long curved blade, the chef’s knife of choice in Türkiye—he does so with menacing speed, rocking it back and forth, up and down across his cutting board. Reducing first a mound of pistachios, then a heap of chunked lamb, to the sort of mince you’d think only a food processor capable. I kept my distance.

He wiped the zirh clean, then pushed the piles of nuts and meat together and rocked and rolled the blade through them again, mashing and chopping them into a green-flecked mass of ground lamb. Despite his blurring speed, his chopping was exacting. Neither nut nor speck of meat strayed. With a knife like that, I’d have hacked off multiple limbs by this point.

“They are green gold,” he said of the pistachios, which are ubiquitous to cooking here in Gaziantep, a city tight to Türkiye’s southern border with Syria. We were at Kebapçı Yalçın, or Yalçın’s Kebab Shop, and he was teaching me one of the city’s signature kebabs—fıstıklı kebab. It probably won’t surprise you that fıstıklı is Turkish for pistachios.

“Everybody is making this kebab,” he said with a smile. “But mine is different.” Indeed, it was.

Tasdelen started cooking when he was 11. He enjoyed it so much, he left school. He started washing dishes, then worked as a butcher—a skill he clearly retained. Eventually, he became a cook and opened his own shop, now a sprawling restaurant dominated by a charcoal-fueled grill the length of a bus and numerous glass cases of kebabs at the ready.

But those kebabs. He also does a poppy seed version, prepared in a similar way but spiced with garlic and chili and sweet red pepper. Delicious, but it is the pistachio kebabs that draw the crowds. And when I tasted them, I understood.
By this stage, I’d eaten similar kebabs at a variety of shops across the city. All were wonderful—especially those that layered in the spices, a mix of mint, oregano and chilies—but Tasdelen’s stood out. Enough so that though I’d already eaten four meals that day—torturous, I know—I kept going back for more bites despite having promised myself I’d only taste.

It mostly was a matter of ratio. To 1½ pounds of lamb, he chopped in close to 2 cups pistachios, far more than I’d seen any other cook use. And it made a difference in both taste and texture. Those pistachios added meaty sweet-and-savory notes that balanced the lamb so perfectly. They also added a gentle texture, neither crisp nor tender.

The result was surprisingly... burger-like? I know that doesn’t make sense. But the combination of creamy-sweet-nutty pistachios and ground meat somehow evoked a burger for me when grilled. At once familiar and completely foreign.

Except, as simple as Tasdelen’s recipe was, we faced a challenge bringing it home. Turkish kebabs are grilled on large, flat skewers, giving ample surface for the ground meat to cling to. In the U.S., our skewers tend to be slim and needle-­like. If you want to watch your hard work slough off onto the coals, be my guest.

Our solution was found... on social media! There, armies of cooks before us have mastered what we have dubbed the sheet-pan kebab. Rather than try to force ground meat to stick to a skinny skewer, they simply form the mixture into thick strips on a sheet pan, mimicking the size and shape of proper Turkish kebabs.

Inspired, we tried the method with our pistachio kebab recipe and were delighted by the delicious results. And ease! Despite our success, while I was brave enough to buy and bring home a zirh, I thus far have lacked the courage to use it. That’s probably for the best.

JM Hirsch

J.M. Hirsch is a James Beard Award-winning food and travel writer and editorial director of Christopher Kimball's Milk Street. He is the former national food editor for The Associated Press and has written six books, including “Freezer Door Cocktails: 75 Cocktails That Are Ready When You Are.”