It’s prep shift at Hamdi, and the room smells like fire. Winter sunlight filters in, and there’s a faint hum of spices in the charred air. Chef Berk Güldal is giving a private tutorial on making Turkish Adana-style kebap—aka kebab—a meticulous, laborious two-day process that plumps up these peppery lamb skewers.
Hand-mincing kebap is considered an art form in Southwest Asia, but this time-consuming process is being practiced less and less these days—even in Turkey, and certainly here in Seattle. Güldal, however, has all the time in the world to practice this thousand-year-old culinary craft.
Hamdi opened in 2021 as a Turkish food truck and moved into its beautiful, simple fine-dining space on Leary Way the following year. Güldal and his partner, Katrina Schult, had spent their careers in Michelin-starred restaurants—in Güldal’s hometown of Istanbul as well as NYC and Healdsburg, California, among other places—before peacing out to starless, Michelin-free Seattle to do their own thing.
That thing is fire. “We don’t have gas ranges,” Güldal says. “It’s all fire—wood or charcoal.” Low flames and embers burn here and there under grills around the open kitchen. It’d be a waste to NOT make kebap here.
The artist’s tools are a butcher block, a scraper, and a giant medieval-looking Turkish zirh (“zuh-ruh”). Genetically somewhere between a machete and a Bowie knife, it looks like the weapon your orc-slaying half-paladin/half-rogue D&D character carries. A fantasy knife.
I ask him if he bought it in Turkey, and he says, “No. I got it on Etsy.”
Güldal holds his colossal knife with both hands. A few pieces of suet—the hard fat that surrounds a lamb’s kidneys—sit in a ninth pan. He utilizes the zirh as a parer, deftly removing the silverskin enclosing each parcel of fat. “In Turkey,” he says, “they use tail fat for kebap. But it’s a different kind of lamb with a much bigger tail. It’s like a second butt.” However, America’s lambs aren’t quite as caked up, so Hamdi uses suet instead.
It’s no compromise. “To be honest, this lamb right here is the best lamb ever,” Güldal boasts. “We don’t need the tail.” Hamdi sources lamb from Anderson Ranches, 30 minutes outside Eugene, Oregon. “I cooked a lot of lamb in New York and California, at Michelin restaurants? I never tasted any lamb like this lamb.”
Güldal adds that Hamdi only uses grass-fed lamb, so Anderson Ranches is a natural choice, where free-range sheep and lambs graze on pasture ryegrass, herbs, and flowering forbs. “I really believe that grass-fed meat is the best, most nutritious food for your body,” he says. “It’s more chewy. It’s not gonna melt in your mouth. That’s why it’s great for kebap.”
The artist’s canvas is a massive wooden butcher’s block. This one was custom-made by Lee Andrews, a woodcarver in Walla Walla. “This artist told us this block’s gonna survive like four generations,” Güldal says. “Plastic just breaks.”
He sets the snow-white suet chunks on the block, then places his two-foot blade alongside them. Carefully but powerfully, he lifts the knife’s handle up and out, like a crank on a water pump, pinching the back of the blade with his other hand. He slides it back and forth over the pile for what seems like 20 minutes but is probably like five.
After Güldal pulverizes the suet into a hill of crumbles, Schult brings over some rough-chopped lamb belly, cold from the fridge, where it’s been aged for 24 hours. He begins delicately smithereening it with the same precise skill: slicing motions, not crushing motions. Sounds simple, but it really is a complex physical performance, requiring minute movements to flick and flex this heavy sword. Controlled strength as art. I could watch him do this all day.
“The purpose of this knife is to slice,” Güldal says. “When you put meat in a grinder—how most people do kebap now—it smooshes it, and it becomes very sticky and soft and loses texture. But here, you use a very sharp knife like this one, moving it minimally to slice, not chop.”
He adds that a grinder creates a dry kebap. “Not as juicy. And the texture this way is gonna be very coarse. Not, like, smooshed.” That coarseness creates more edges and facets to be Maillarded later.
After mincing the meat and fat separately, Güldal does the same to a red bell pepper. Then he methodically kneads the pepper, lamb belly, and suet together to create binding protein structures. “Another thing,” he says, after wordlessly kebapping for a while, “is that you don’t wanna use gloves to do this. Because then it tastes like gloves. I believe the flavor of your hand needs to go in the food.”
Güldal produces a speckled loaf of mince. Now it’s time to season: paprika, Turkish pepper flakes, and salt. He pulls out a sheet pan of lined-up skewers, specifying that they must be iron, not aluminum, and starts fleshing out the metal skeletons.
The meat football gradually disappears as Güldal applies it to the skewers, punctilious, his fingers tantamount in his arsenal to his big-ass knife. We simmer in the piano lick from “Ms. Jackson” on the aux as he shapes the mince. Per tradition, he’s giving the kebap a subtly scalloped pattern, for both Mailliard reaction and artisanal reasons. Meaty finger waves.
And that’s it. They’re ready to hit the charcoal. The raw skewers look kinda pixelated, since unrendered suet is so brittle, but it’ll liquefy into nutty, golden, umami-tinged tallow on the grill, like lamby compound butter. It’s the art of suspense. A delicious future promise.
When asked if doing this makes him feel like an ancient person from a thousand years ago, Güldal frowns. “No! I believe we should still do these things today, not just in ancient history. I actually think everything has gotten too modern, too easy. I think we’re losing the fun part.”
Güldal takes a beat to admire his handiwork, then nods solemnly. “This is the fun part.”
