A colleague recently arranged a lunch that featured ethnic foods from the Balkans: e.g. Yugoslavia, Bosnia, and Serbia. The lunch featured kebabs of spiced minced meat called cevapcici (ćevapčići).

When I was invited to participate in the lunch, I immediately looked for recipes, reviews, and accounts from travellers to the Balkans. According to various sources, including Wikipedia, etymologically speaking, the word, cevapcici comes from the Turkish word for kebab. Cevapcici also varies regionally. Macedonian cevapcici contains pork. Serbian and Bosnian cevapcici is made entirely of red meat: lamb and beef (sometimes veal). The version that we orderred was Bosnian. It was served in a soft and fluffy flatbread, called lepina (or lepinja).

Several accounts described cevapcici as essentially caseless sausages that consist of heavily worked spiced beef with some breadcrumbs. Most recipes involve cooking them on a grill or barbecue. From my meagre experience sampling traditional foods from Eastern Europe, the descriptions of cevapcici reminded me of Turkish kefta (sp?), which is also a kebab that is cooked on a barbecue. One popular recipe for cevapcici that I kept running into comes from an old episode of the Frugal Gourmet, a former television program on public broadcasting that was hosted by the late Jeff Smith. I later learned that his recipe, because of its added ground pork, onions, and spices, more resembled a dish called pljeskavica, which is more Serbian. Bosnian cevapcici has no onions or Hungarian paprika. It is cigar shaped. Pljeskavica is shaped like large hamburger patties.

The cevapcici that we tried came from a Bosnian Deli on 956 Merivale Road, called Skela: Fine European Food. Along with the cevapcici, we also had burek. Burek is a spiral pastry that can be filled with cheese, meat, or spinach. It is made by taking a table sized sheet of phylo-like pastry, which is produced by hours of kneedings, and rolling it up to encase the filling. The whole thing is then placed in a tight spiral into a round baking sheet, brushed with butter, and baked.

The flavour and texture of the cevapcici are distinctive. Cevapcici tastes of finely ground meat that was well worked, conservatively seasoned, and then perfectly grilled. Each sausage-like link had a very light crust, which means that it was cooked with care at high temperatures. Both the crust and the seasonings provide flavors that compliment and don't overpower the meat. The texture was indeed soft and juicy, almost spongy. I've encounterred the same texture before with steamed meat dishes in Asian cuisine. It is difficult to replicate, as my many attempts to make Chinese soup meatballs demonstrate. I was told that, while the texture of the cevapcici that we ate came from adding mineral water (approx. 1/4 cup per 2 lb of ground meat) to the meat, the texture can also be produced by working the minced meat and chilling overnight.

The burek had a very crispy pastry. Having seen this dish in cooking and travel shows on FoodTV, I never thought I would be able to encounter this pastry in Ottawa. Happily, I was able to try both a meat-filled and cheese-filled version. The meat filled version contained spiced meat. The cheese filled version contained a salty white cheese.

Both the burek and cevapcici will have me visiting Skela sometime soon to try them again.

Particulars:
Skela: Fine European Food
956 Merivale Road
(613)321-6692



Bookmark with: