Samsa

the Central Asian tandoor pastry: flaky dough folded round minced lamb and a great weight of onion, slapped onto the clay wall and baked until blistered

Origin: Samarkand, Tashkent & Transoxiana

From the journey of Wheat.

Samsa is baked, not fried, and that single fact separates it from most of the pastry family it belongs to. The dough is rolled, spread with fat, rolled into a rope and coiled so it bakes in flaky layers; it is folded into a triangle or a square around raw minced lamb and onion; and then it is slapped, wet side down, onto the inner wall of a tandyr, the clay oven, where it sticks and bakes in the falling heat until the top blisters and the base crisps against the clay. The filling goes in raw and the onion carries it. The proportion is close to equal weights of meat and onion, sometimes more onion than meat, and it is cut by hand rather than minced, because the point is that it should release its water into the sealed pastry and steam the lamb from inside. A piece of tail fat goes in with it. The pastry catches that liquid, which is why a samsa is eaten carefully and why biting into one carelessly is a well-known way to burn your chin. The name travels much further than the pastry. Arabic sambusak, Persian sanbosag, Indian samosa, Gulf samboosa, Tajik somsa, and this are all one word, spread by the same medieval trade in cookbooks and merchants, and the recipes diverged completely. The Indian version is fried and often vegetarian; the Gulf version is thin-skinned and belongs to Ramadan; the Central Asian one is baked, layered, and full of onion. It is street food and bazaar food across the whole region, sold hot from the tandyr from a hatch in the wall, and it is one of very few dishes that a Kazakh, a Kyrgyz, an Uzbek, a Tajik, and a Turkmen would all recognise immediately as their own without arguing much about it.

Ingredients

Dough

  • 500 g plain flour
  • 1.5 tsp salt
  • 280 ml warm water, approximately
  • 120 g butter or rendered lamb fat, softened, for layering

Filling

  • 500 g lamb shoulder, hand-chopped into small dice
  • 450 g onions, finely chopped
  • 80 g lamb tail fat, finely diced, or 2 tbsp oil
  • 2 tsp salt
  • 1.5 tsp freshly ground black pepper
  • 1.5 tsp ground cumin

To finish

  • 1 egg yolk beaten with 1 tbsp water, to glaze
  • 2 tbsp black sesame or nigella seeds

Method

  1. Make a firm dough with the flour, salt, and water, knead it for ten minutes, and rest it covered for forty minutes.
  2. Chop the lamb by hand into small dice rather than mincing it. A machine mince turns to paste and the filling wants texture.
  3. Mix the lamb, onion, tail fat, salt, pepper, and cumin. Do not add any liquid: the onion will supply all of it in the oven.
  4. Roll the rested dough out very thin on a large surface, as close to translucent as you can.
  5. Spread the softened butter across the whole sheet with your hands, right to the edges.
  6. Roll the sheet up tightly into a long rope, then coil the rope into a spiral and rest it for twenty minutes. This is what produces the layers.
  7. Cut the rope into 12 pieces, stand each cut side up, and press it flat before rolling it out into a round about 12cm across.
  8. Put a heaped tablespoon of filling in the middle, then bring three sides up to meet in the centre and pinch the seams hard into a triangle.
  9. Seal them properly. A samsa that opens in the oven loses the juice that is the whole reward for making it.
  10. Heat the oven to 220°C with a heavy tray or baking stone in it. Set the samsa seam side down on baking paper, brush the tops with egg yolk, and scatter over the seeds.
  11. Bake for thirty to thirty-five minutes, until deep brown and blistered. Do not open the oven in the first twenty.
  12. Rest them for five minutes before eating, and bite a small hole first: the trapped juice is extremely hot.

Notes

Hand-chop the lamb; minced meat gives a dense, pasty filling instead of the loose juicy one this pastry is built around. Match the onion to the meat by weight, because the onion is the liquid and the sweetness both. Add no water to the filling. The rolled-and-coiled dough is what makes the layers, and skipping it gives a perfectly edible pastry that is not samsa. A tandyr is the real thing and a very hot oven with a preheated stone is the practical substitute; the base needs fierce bottom heat to crisp.

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