INdulge: It's grilling season. Greek-style kebabs were best thing I ate in Indy this week.
With Memorial Day weekend behind us, the Midwest has entered arguably its most important and culturally salient time of the year — grilling season.
While I have every intention of celebrating the next few months with untold numbers of hamburgers and hot dogs, for this week's INdulge I tipped my cap to the grilling tradition of another region. This is:
When I envision a quintessential cookout, the image isn't complete without a few shish kebabs. The practice of jabbing a stick through meat and throwing it on a fire strikes me as one of mankind's top innovations, up there with antibiotics and crop rotation. For an exemplary taste of that storied culinary technique, consider the kofta kebab platter ($17) from Noor Café at Keystone at the Crossing.
More: A year after after The TRAP closed, Chef Oya teaches the next generation of Indy chefs
Kofta is a class of meat dishes found across the globe, most notably in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Minced meat is kneaded with spices, herbs and sometimes grains or aromatic vegetables to form a dense, complexly flavored mass. Noor Café, which specializes in Greek and Indian food, shapes beef and spices into a log roughly the size of a kosher dill pickle, spears it with a flat wooden skewer and grills it until it's zebra-striped with char.
The kofta's thin browned crust hides a compact, springy interior that releases juice like the gratuitous close-up of a cheeseburger in a fast-food commercial. A garlic-heavy seasoning blend delivers supremely savory mouthfuls with a touch of heat. The kofta's spice resembles that of raw onion or freshly cracked peppercorns, less of a lingering burn and more like a swift kick in the mouth.
Noor Café's kofta kebabs come atop a multicolor jumble of grilled vegetables and basmati rice with a small Greek salad on the side. But the kofta is the headliner, literally dripping with cookout flavor, albeit from a cookout a few thousand miles east.
Kofta is a loanword borrowed from India's Hindustani and Iran/Persia's Farsi that translates to 'pounded meat.' The earliest known kofta recipes appear in Arabic cookbooks written around the 10th century, though the dish has since been embraced by several cuisines including Greek and Indian. Kebab, meanwhile, likely originated in Ancient Persia as a word broadly used for roasted meat.
Previously in INdulge: Italian sandwich at new SoBro Mediterranean restaurant is best thing I ate this week
Nowadays, at least in the United States, we tend to think of all kebabs as shish kebabs (şiş means "sword" or "skewer" in Turkish). One popular shish kebab origin story tells of medieval Turkish soldiers who roasted meat on their swords over open fires during military campaigns in Anatolia. More realistically, shish kebabs were likely around long before then — pointy sticks and fire historically haven't been hard to come by — but I can't fault anyone for sticking with a reasonably plausible and, frankly, pretty cool-sounding story.
Regardless of their exact history, kebabs remain a shining example of what can be accomplished on hot metal grates, and Noor Café's kofta (with zero disrespect to Indiana State Fair vendors) is as good a food as you could hope to find on a stick. It's the sort of dish that makes even a proud city mouse like me sorely miss the unimpeded grill access I had growing up in the suburbs.
While I can't imagine my landlords would love it if I put a charcoal grill in the middle of my 600-square-foot apartment, a good cookout is a good cookout. There's got to be a loophole in my lease somewhere.
What: Kofta kebab platter, $17
Where: Noor Café, 3315 E. 86th St., (317) 200-8128, noorcafeindy.com
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