Kebab: 25 interesting facts about it!

Kebab has rapidly become a famous and tasty delicacy across the world, popularly seen as the perfect finish to a fun night out. Let’s see some interesting facts about it!

1.Donair meat is sliced from a conical loaf cooked on a vertical spit, made from a combination of ground beef, flour or bread crumbs, and various spices. The sauce is distinctively sweet compared to doner kebabs, being made from condensed milk, sugar, vinegar, and garlic.

2. Researchers found that the average kebab provided 98 per cent of the daily salt quota for an adult. A typical example also contained nearly 1,000 calories, which is half the daily recommended maximum for women, and 148 per cent of the daily saturated fat limit.

3. The practice of cooking meat on a stick or skewer originates in prehistorical times, possibly as long as a million years ago, when early humans began cooking with fire.

4. Excavations in Santorini, Greece, unearthed stone sets of barbecue for skewers used before the 17th century BC. In each pair of the supports, the receptions for the spits are found in absolute equivalence, while the line of small openings in the base formed a mechanism to supply the coals with oxygen so that they remained alight during its use.

5. Mycenaean Greeks used portable tray as grills. These trays were rectangular ceramic pans that sat underneath skewers of meat but it is not clear whether these trays would have been placed directly over a fire or if the pans would have held hot coals like a portable barbecue pit.

6. According to Sevan Nişanyan, an etymologist of the Turkish language, the word kebab is derived from the Persian word “kabab” meaning “fry”.

7. The word was first mentioned in a Turkish script of Kyssa-i Yusuf in 1377, which is the oldest known source where kebab is mentioned as a food.

8. Kebab is considered to have originated in Turkey when soldiers used to grill chunks of freshly hunted animals skewed on swords on open field fires.

10. The true shish kebabs are pieces of marinated lamb affixed to flat or four-sided bladed metal skewers that are grilled over a fire suspended by a skewer holder, without the meat ever touching the grilling grate.

11. There are numerous varieties of kebab from many countries.

12. Persian kebab was served in the royal houses during various Islamic Empires and even commoners would enjoy it for breakfast with naan or pita.

13. Kebabs in Armenia are prepared of ground meat spiced with pepper, parsley and other herbs and roasted on skewers.

14. In Bulgaria, the word кебап (kebap) is a generic term for meat stews with few or no vegetables.

15. Although gyros is unquestionably of Middle Eastern origin, the issue of whether modern-day souvlaki came to Greece via Turkish cuisine, and should be considered a Greek styling of shish kebab, or is a contemporary revival of Greek tradition dating as far back as 17th century BC Minoan civilization is a topic of sometimes heated debate, at least between Greeks and Turks.

17. The German-style döner kebab was supposedly invented by a Turkish immigrant in Berlin in the 1970s and became a popular German take-away food during the 1990s. It is almost exclusively sold by Turks and considered a Turkish specialty in Germany.

18. In Europe, kebab has become a symbol of immigration from the Muslim world.

19. Speaking Norwegian with an Arab accent or with a lot of words and expressions borrowed from the Pakistani, Turkish, Arabic, and Persian languages is sometimes referred to as Kebabnorsk (Kebab Norwegian)

20. In 2009, the Italian city of Lucca banned new ethnic restaurants from opening in its centre, a ruling which had a marked effect on vendors of kebab.

21. Robert Ménard, the mayor of the French city of Béziers, known for his opposition to Islam and immigration, banned new kebab restaurants, claiming that they were threatening French culture.

22. In France kebabs are usually served with french fries, often stuffed into the bread itself. In Paris, this variation is called Sandwich grec (“Greek sandwich”).

23. The variety of kebabs are seemingly endless. The word kebab means “to roast,” which is what grilling is, properly speaking. Besides the familiar shish kebab there are orman kebabi which is whole roasted lamb, çoban kebabi a shepherd’s-style roast of meat stuck through a stick that is driven into the ground before an open-field fire; hacci osman kebabi, a roast on a revolving spit; süt kebabi is meat parboiled in milk, then skewered and roasted; kushbashi kebabi is another skewered and roasted kebab; koyun kebabi is a whole lamb roasted in a covered pit; kabarma kebabi is a grilled spatchcocked fowl (split open at the belly, kept whole, and flattened with a mallet); kefenli kebabi is roast meat wrapped in a “shroud” of bread.

24. The kebab has a vital place in true traditional Pakistani cuisine. Some of the most famous kebabs include Seekh, Shami, Reshmi, Chapli, Bihari, Tikka, Chicken, Fish, Dhags, Doner, Pasanday, Peshawari, Qeema, and many more.

25. Every Turkish cookbook has a chapter called kebaplar, where dozens more recipes exist.