Remember this guy? Look at him, dimpling a dough round with the sharp corner of a drywall knife. Leslie Minora found his tiny bakery in Plano while researching Iraqi immigration, and I'm still thinking about him. Leslie returned from the trip with a bag full of freshly baked bread. The inside of the plastic was wet with condensed steam. The loaves were blistered and chewy and I ate one entirely.
That in mind, I wish I could find a restaurant that would do the following:
Marinate large hunks of chicken in olive oil, a little garlic, some herbs and a lot of lemon, and thread them on a skewer. (They could give lamb the exact same treatment with delicious results.) When someone orders a sandwich, they lay the skewer over a hot grill and start the bread. They don't have to use a drywall knife; they can use a dimpling tool that looks like this:
They use the bread like a mitt to pull the meat from the skewer when it's finished grilling. Top the round with lettuce, tomato and red-onion slivers, and serve a little yogurt sauce hopped up with a little more lemon on the side. Then watch as a line forms outside your door and prepare to make 700 more sandwiches. Simple scratch cooking, made to order. Sublime.
Anyone seen my sandwich lately? It's probably in a strip mall in Plano or Richardson or Garland, produced by a restaurant with kebab, kabab, kabob, or kebap in the name. If you have any information that could possibly lead to re-uniting me with my long lost friend, please leave it in the comments below.
