Lahmajun (Armenian Flatbread With Spiced Lamb)

As a thin, chewy-crisp flatbread with an aromatic, bright-red topping on it, lahmajun gets called “Armenian pizza” by non-Armenians all the time. This is fine, since it does give non-Armenians a solid point of reference for an otherwise unfamiliar dish, though the analogy really only goes so far. Where pizza is topped with cheese and a tomato-based sauce, lahmajun is cheeseless and topped with a thin layer of a lamb- or beef-based paste that is intensely flavored with chiles, tomato, aromatic onion, garlic, red bell pepper, parsley, and warm spices. The onion and bell pepper are finely ground and drained of excess water, so the topping emerges from the oven steaming and moist, but not wet. In this way, lahmajun is less like pizza and more like a ground meat kofta—an Armenian “hamburger," if you will—smooshed into a thin layer onto the bread. Nevertheless, lahmajun and pizza are both absolutely delicious, especially when eaten hot from the oven, and both are easy to make at home, provided you have the right recipe (namely, mine).

The Key Techniques for Properly Shaped, Tender Flatbreads

As with many flatbreads (including pizza), the dough for lahmajun is rolled out thinly before being topped. But this poses a technical challenge. On the one hand, we want to roll out and shape the flatbread properly, but on the other, we want to prevent excessive gluten formation from overworking the dough, which can result in a tough or chewy texture. So, how does one get the dough rolled out and shaped properly without causing it to deform or get tough in the process? Over the years, I’ve come up with a bunch of strategies for flatbread success, several of which I employ here. 

First, I mix the dough gently, without kneading of any kind, other than a short hand mixing in the bowl to get the ingredients fully combined. This might seem counterintuitive, since breads often require structure-building via kneading, but as long as you choose the right flour—bread flour, in this case, with its high percentage of gluten-forming proteins—you end up with more than enough structure to yield a chewy-crisp flatbread without calling for kneading. 

Secondly, I shape the dough into balls after a brief room-temperature fermentation—about 90 minutes, just long enough to let the yeast in it wake up and the dough expand a bit—and then move them into the refrigerator. After that, they continue to ferment slowly, for at least eight hours (and up to 24 hours). Shaping the dough balls early on in a long fermentation gives the dough ample time to relax, which makes rolling it out easy, while also building flavor.

Cold-proofing shaped dough balls also builds a measure of convenience into the recipe, because you make the dough one day and bake them the next. Best of all, unlike many flatbreads, you roll out the lahmajun dough cold, straight from the fridge, so you can start baking as soon as the oven and baking surface is hot, without having to spend time letting the dough warm up before use.

Aside from flour, water, salt, and yeast, my dough formula contains a touch of vegetable oil for added tenderness and to promote crisping, along with a little sugar, to promote rapid browning. 

How to Make a Flavorful—Not Wet—Topping

To control the water content in the topping, I grind the onion and red bell pepper in a food processor along with a generous amount of salt; I then move the mixture to a strainer to drain for 10 minutes. The salt draws excess water from the vegetables, which drips through the strainer into a bowl below. This helps reduce a watery topping later.

After that, I return the drained mixture to the food processor, along with the remaining seasonings: parsley, red pepper paste (a.k.a. biber salçasi in Turkish—most brands are made there), tomato paste, a few garlic cloves, allspice, paprika, cumin, and black pepper. I process everything to a fine, even paste, then add the meat in small nuggets and pulse everything together until it just comes together, to retain some texture to the meat. 

As for what type of meat to use, beef or lamb, that’s up to you. I like lamb best myself, but I’m Armenian, so that’s a given. No matter which you choose, try to find meat that is freshly ground with a coarse-but-even texture; usually this means going to a butcher. Classically, the topping for lahmajun was hand-minced with a knife (or a pair of them), which divides it finely without mashing it to an amorphous paste; using freshly ground meat is the next best thing to hand-mincing it. That said, if all you can find is prepackaged meat, use it! I do sometimes, and it works fine. 

As with the dough, the topping can be made up to 24 hours ahead of time and kept in the refrigerator. You do want to let it warm at room temperature for about 30 minutes before baking, since that will make it easier to spread without mashing or deforming the rolled-out dough.

How to Assemble and Bake Lahmajun

Traditionally, lahmajun is baked in blazing hot wood-fired ovens. The good news is that you can still make a great one in a home oven at a temperature of 500˚F (or 550˚F, if you are lucky enough to have an oven that goes that high), as long as you use a solid home pizza baking approach:

Cook them on a preheated baking stone or, preferably for more conductivity, a baking steel (heated at your maximum oven temperature at least 30 minutes for a steel or an hour for a stone), and placed high in the oven, which ensures rapid heating from both above and below, for even, quick cooking. Just make sure not to set the oven rack so high that it’s a challenge to get the lahmajun in and out; you want to give yourself four to five inches of headroom, which means either the top or second from the top rack position.

Once the surface is good and hot, you can get down to baking. Because the dough should be nice and relaxed by now, it won’t take much effort to pat and roll out. Be sure to use plenty of flour on the dough and the counter to prevent sticking, to avoid tearing or overworking it. It's best to roll from the center out, rotating the dough regularly, to keep the circle as round as possible. Once it is between 11 and 12 inches, move it to a floured peel. 

Pro lahmajun bakers just smoosh the topping with their fingertips around the dough in a matter of seconds, but this takes lots and lots of practice to pull off without manhandling the dough and/or making an unsanitary mess. I use a different approach to minimize hand contact with the paste: You scoop the topping mixture in a 1/2 cup dry measuring cup and use a small spoon to distribute dollops of it evenly around the disc. You then use the back of the spoon and a fingertip to flatten the dollops and cover the dough completely, aside from a 1/8-inch-wide border.

Then it goes into the oven to bake until the crust is browned around the edges and on the underside, which takes about five minutes. (The topping will be steaming hot at this point, but it should not dry out or brown.) While one bakes you can roll out the next one, and all four flatbreads should take less than half an hour to complete. 

Serving Lahmajun

Lahmajun is great with little more than a squirt of fresh lemon juice as a foil for its richness. But it’s also often served with a crisp, cool, and tart vegetable salad, either as a side dish, or—better yet—as a filling to fold or wrap the flatbread around, burrito-style. One classic Armenian salad I like to use here is thinly-sliced red onion and parsley, dressed with ground sumac, lemon juice, and olive oil. To temper the pungency of the onion, I first soak it in boiling water for 5 minutes to pull off most of the intense sulfur compounds that form when it is cut.

Once you try it—it makes a great light lunch and is a welcome addition to a mezze spread—I think you’ll agree that while lahmajun and pizza are not the same, both are worth adding to your flatbread repertoire.