Melek Erdal’s İçli Köfte Two Ways (One Disrespectful)
An essay and recipes for two bulgur dough dumplings – one stuffed, one unstuffed – served with garlic yoghurt and chilli butter. Words and images by Melek Erdal.
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‘I Can Disrespect My Own’: İçli Köfte Two Ways


When Esra, my housemate and resident Kurdish correspondent, asked me what the recipe for my next column was going to be, I said, ‘It’s definitely not going to be içli köfte. It’s too complicated. How will I describe the process? You have to live this recipe, be around it. It’s made in groups, in bulk.’
‘Always for the freezer, never really for the actual day,’ Esra replied.
And yet here I am, attempting to instruct you on how to make one of the most revered and highly judged dishes in the diasporic aunty community. This bulgur wheat dumpling stuffed with spiced lamb is not easy. I have never made it alone and without the dissatisfaction of my elders around me for company, helping to get the balance, textures, and techniques right.
For research, Esra and I decided to call a few of our relatives to ask for their recipe tips. She warned me not to say anything about making a small batch as it ‘might anger the community’. Here are some of the responses we received:
‘A recipe? It’s late, why do you bother me with nonsense?’
‘Don’t dare use eggs in the dough, you’ll shame the village.’
‘I saw you use a cucumber to shape the dough on the Instagram. You’re not taking this seriously.’
‘Who wants to know this recipe? Is it for the English people? Just tell them to come over.’
After multiple FaceTimes, Esra gave up: ‘They make 150 balls at a time. They’re not gonna be able to advise you on four balls, Mel.’
In the early days of Google Translate, if you looked up ‘içli köfte’, it would translate it as ‘sensitive meatball’. The intended meaning of ‘içli’ is ‘with an inside’ – as in köfte with an inside – but ‘sensitive’ is actually a pretty good descriptor for the dish, which is usually served on a bed of garlic yoghurt and topped with chilli butter. As you knead the bulgur wheat with water, semolina, and plain flour, you doubt that it will ever become a dough until, miraculously, it does. The casing must be thin and delicate so as not to dominate the filling, but also needs to be strong enough to hold the filling and withhold the pressure of rigorous boiling. If your balls hold together without falling apart or cracking open, my friends, you might get honorary citizenship. Maybe it’s our version of the Life in the UK test: make a sturdy ball and you’re in.
You can find variations of these dumplings across the Levant: kibbeh, kubbeh, kubba, gubbez (there are even quibe in Brazil). But when they reached Turkey, they became içli köfte. It makes me wonder how the dish travelled, where it started, and why there seems to be such synergy in the dish’s name across the regions except when it reached ours. All the variations differ in their shape, filling, and dough, but most of the other versions are fried, and no one else seems as particular about how thin the casing should be. I once had an Iraqi Kurdish kubba in a soup – it was delicious, massive like an orange – and the bulgur dough was so thick that the filling inside felt less important than the casing absorbing the juices of the soup.
For us, the juices come from the inside of the köfte, bursting out when you break through. Farther east from our villages in Sivas, it’s common to use just minced meat and onion, but we like adding potato too. My mum often uses lamb kavurma (a way of preserving meat, kind of like a terrine) instead of minced meat, and I love this idea. The spices are simple – some pul biber, some reyhan (purple basil), and a tiny amount of salça. It’s the fatty meat, the butter, and the generous amount of onion that are key. Nothing overtakes the other in flavour, with the perfume of the reyhan just coming through beautifully.
In considering whether to share this recipe, I also grappled with whether to provide an easy alternative – a deconstructed version of içli kofte that doesn’t involve stuffing. I thought about whom I might disrespect by doing this … maybe all my ancestors? I was already angering the aunties by sharing this traditional recipe in a way that doesn’t involve making 150 portions. But to share with you a deconstructed version of içli kofte that doesn’t involve stuffing? Well, this is just disrespectful. But then I thought, It’s my culture, I’m allowed to disrespect it.
Who has the right to deviate from an original recipe, how and why? Aren’t all recipes deviations from ones that preceeded them? I was once asked, ‘What is Kurdish food?’, and my response was, ‘Anything I make.’ For us Kurds, a people now formed so much of a diaspora, our dishes are not solely defined by unchanging geography. I remember attending a talk at the British Library with Jessica B Harris at which an audience member asked, ‘How do I stay authentic to my roots when I no longer live on the land?’ Harris responded with a quote from Sam Floyd, a member of her circle of Black intellectuals that included James Baldwin and Maya Angelou: ‘I don’t cover much ground, but I cover the ground I’m standing on.’ I felt the blood in my body form waves. I thought of my grandmother who would place earth from our village under my tongue every time she visited. Our bodies are our country now.
We have autonomy and agency over our history, culture, and any deviations from it. It’s OK to deviate, whether for function or for fun, but as Yvonne Maxwell once said, you must care about the people when claiming the culture.
So, here you go: a recipe for traditional içli köfte, alongside a disrespectful version that involves simply cutting the dough into gnocchi-like (fuck it, we’ve gone this far) pieces, boiling them, and tossing them into the mixture you would have used as a filling.
Enjoy it. Be disrespectful, but do so lovingly and knowingly. And even if you only make one köfte, I will be proud.