I’m in a lucky position. I live in a part of North London where there’s a strong Turkish community and just down the road there’s a lot of Greeks as well. That means I’m tripping over mediterranean delis and restaurants and there’s an abundance of new ingredients to discover that seem to magically fall into my shopping basket on a regular basis. It also puts me in the unique situation of never having any trouble finding ingredients for Ottolenghi recipes, something I doubt many people in the world can claim.
I’ve also been slowly re-discovering the joys of Turkish baking. I remember a childhood holiday to Turkey, where we took a hire car inland away from the pizza, steak and chip emporiums that sadly litter the coast and found a slice of real Turkey. As we drove inland, we got away from the sea and into the hills, to be confronted by a vast green plateau with villages and markets, including plenty of baked goods. Carts filled with sweet pastries, dripping with honey, nuts and flaky pastry. These days in London, I find myself regularly walking past a Turkish bakery which has a lady sitting in the window with a hot plate, making beautiful, freshly stuffed Gözleme, day in, day out, and feel that childhood urge to buy one, every single time I walk past.
Amongst all this baked goodness, I also found khobez bread. Khobez is basically a flatbread, very slightly more ‘bready’ than a tortilla, but still much thinner than a pitta and is cooked like a naan bread on the inside of an oven. It’s perfectly suited to being a dip vehicle or for filling with whatever glorious ingredients you can muster and being rolled up. So when I considered writing a blog post about some wraps, I decided to forego the supermarket tortillas and dive in with the Turkish khobez.
This post also marks the final instalment of my birthday trilogy, where I’ve treated you all to three ideas based around one theme, mint yoghurt. Today’s wraps are simple to make, yet are really enlivened by the mint yoghurt, giving a crisp, bright and fresh edge to the prawns or avocado. Or you can go ‘full monty’ and fill the flatbreads with both avocado and prawns, which makes a mighty wrap that’s stuffed with flavour and ingredients bathing in sauce which will drip all over your plate, ready and waiting for you to mop up hungrily at the end. Enjoy!
Avocado prawn wraps on khobez with mint yoghurt
By Gavin Wren
Makes 4 wraps
PDF recipe card to download or print
Ingredients
4 khobez flatbreads
50g Mixed leaves
A bowl of mint yoghurt
220g cooked prawns
and/or
2 Avocados