How to make a doner kebab

[mr x]

I thought yous might find this interesting.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... oner-kebab" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Step by step.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/ ... 40&index=0" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[bluenose]

...or you could go buy one

but why did they spell it wrong?

[ratchet]

not sure if you're serious with that question or not....

The "Donair" as we know it is a highly regionalized version of the "Doner Kebap," with the main difference being the donair sauce we've all come to love (although the meat also varies slightly).

Since the article isn't from here (it's from the UK), the author likely doesn't even know what a "Donair" is.

And that, my friend, is why you can't get a Donair that's been made "properly" outside of this region (or one with a large population from here).


Great... now I'm craving a donair.

[bluenose]

I was joking about the spelling... but I had always thought the donair was from this region

There is now a place in Toronto that sells "Nova Scotian Donairs"

[jeffsmith]

There is now a place in Toronto that sells "Nova Scotian Donairs"

I'm guessing there's likely lots of places like that scattered across the country (as ratchet mentioned). There's a little joint on Jasper Ave. in Edmonton, just down the street from my old office that made great Maritime-style donairs.

[mr x]

The Gyro’s History Unfolds

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/15/dinin ... wanted=all" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

SHOUTING over the hiss and screech of an assembly line, Chris Tomaras described the feat of food engineering that made him rich.

“The trick,” he yelled in a heavy Greek accent, “is to use certain forces, like temperature and pressure, to preserve the product as a solid mass, so it doesn’t deteriorate.”

A dapper man with a rich baritone voice and a gray mustache, Mr. Tomaras, 73, was narrating a tour of Kronos Foods, the world’s largest manufacturer of gyros (pronounced YEE-ros, Greek for “spin”), the don’t-ask mystery meat that has been a Greek restaurant staple in the United States since the mid 1970s. Cones of gyro meat rotate on an estimated 50,000 vertical broilers across the country, to be carved a few slices at a time and folded in pita bread along with a dollop of yogurt sauce.

Kronos is the perfect place to pose a couple of questions that seem as if they should have been answered many hurried lunches ago: What are gyros anyway, and who made them a ubiquitous feature of Greek menus across the United States?

And now is an appropriate time to delve into this enigma wrapped in a flatbread. A cheap meal looks pretty appealing lately, and more people than ever seem to be succumbing to this $5 temptation.

While almost all segments of the restaurant industry are suffering, the titans of the gyro — all of them based in Chicago — report that sales are either steady or way up.

These companies are private, so their word will have to do. But Kronos is preparing to move to a new plant that will enable it to crank out enough cones for 600,000 sandwiches a day, about twice the capacity in its current address. A few miles away, at Devanco Foods, Peter Bartzis, the president of the company, reports record sales. “I’ve been through a few recessions,” Mr. Bartzis said, “and they’re good times to be in the gyros business.”

Mr. Tomaras opened Kronos in 1975 and sold it to a private equity firm in 1994. But he returned to the plant, on a dead-end industrial road in Chicago’s southwest side, to explain how gyros are made. It’s a show and tell that is not for the squeamish.

The process starts with boxes of raw beef and lamb trimmings, and ends with what looks like oversized Popsicles the shade of a Band-Aid. In between, the meat is run through a four-ton grinder, where bread crumbs, water, oregano and other seasonings are added. A clumpy paste emerges and is squeezed into a machine that checks for metal and bone. (“You can never be too careful,” Mr. Tomaras said.) Hydraulic pressure — 60 pounds per square inch — is used to fuse the meat into cylinders, which are stacked on trays and then rolled into a flash freezer, where the temperature is 20 degrees below zero.

Gyros are believed to have originated in Greece. (They’re similar to the döner kebabs of Turkey and shawarma of the Middle East, which are slices of meat, rather than a minced loaf.) But they were never mass produced in Europe, according to the gyro magnates of this city. Until the early 1970s, the cones were made one at a time, in restaurant kitchens using family recipes.

Then someone thought, why not make gyro cones the same way you make cars?

The question is: Who is the Henry Ford of the gyro? It turns out there are a handful of contenders, all of whom know one another and have been friendly competitors for decades. They include George Apostolou, who says he served the first gyros in the United States, in the Parkview Restaurant in Chicago, in 1965, and nine years later opened a 3,000-square-foot manufacturing plant, Central Gyros Wholesale.

“The response to the product was tremendous,” Mr. Apostolou said. “My two brothers and I, we became millionaires in two years’ time.”

And what of Mr. Tomaras?

“Chris claims that he brought the product here,” Mr. Apostolou said, rather dryly. “This is a lie.”

But an engineer named Peter Parthenis says he beat Mr. Apostolou to mass production by a year, with Gyros Inc., in 1973. Mr. Parthenis started by building rotisseries, but soon realized the money was in the meat.

“We didn’t have a distribution deal in the early days,” said Mr. Parthenis, who like Mr. Apostolou is now retired. “So the first gyros ever shipped out of Chicago we put on a Greyhound bus, headed to Atlanta. Frozen in a double corrugated box, with the luggage.”

Case closed? Well, another contender, Andre Papantoniou, a founder and the president of Olympia Food Industries, says the gyro plant was actually the brainchild of the improbably named John Garlic.

This initially sounds like a joke, but Mr. Papantoniou swears that during the rotisserie-making phase of Mr. Parthenis’s career, one John Garlic showed up in Chicago in search of a partner in a gyro plant he’d started in Milwaukee.

It’s true, Mr. Parthenis said in a second call, though he remembers little about his former partner, except that the guy looked like a hippie. Who Mr. Garlic was and why he made gyros are questions that Mr. Parthenis can’t answer: “He was like a phantom. He came out of nowhere.”

There is little about John Garlic in news archives, aside from a 1978 story in The Milwaukee Sentinel, in which a John J. Garlic discusses his plans to keep trained dolphins in a former municipal pool he’d bought in the city and wanted to turn into a restaurant with a kind of Sea World sideshow.

Unfortunately, Mr. Garlic is no longer around to discuss matters; he died of kidney failure in 1994. But his wife, Margaret Garlic, can provide answers.

So, who was John Garlic?

“He was this big guy,” she said, “like 6 foot 2 inches tall, dark curly hair, couple hundred pounds. A former Marine. A super intelligent, super entertaining man. My brother used to say, ‘When John Garlic enters a room, you know you’re going to have fun.’ ”

And he was Greek?

“No, no,” she said. “He was Jewish.”

As we digest the fact that the Father of the American Gyro was Jewish, we ask the obvious next question: Where did he get the idea?

“From me,” Ms. Garlic said. “One afternoon, I was watching ‘What’s My Line?’ and there was a Greek restaurant owner on the show, and he did this demonstration, carving meat off a gyro. I immediately called an operator and asked for the number of a Greek restaurant in New York. The owner I got on the phone said, ‘Go to Chicago, there’s a huge Greek community.’ ” At the time, Mr. Garlic was a Cadillac salesman, in his late 30s, but he quickly saw his future in gyro cones. After finding a Chicago chef willing to share a recipe, the couple rented space in a sausage plant and cranked out history’s first assembly-line gyro cones. They were a hit.

“We supplied summer festivals, universities, some restaurants,” Ms. Garlic said. “John could sell anything.”

Hoping to expand, he sought out Peter Parthenis. There were tensions from the start; Mr. Parthenis says his own buttoned-down style didn’t jibe with the unbuttoned Mr. Garlic. According to Ms. Garlic, Mr. Parthenis wanted to run the company on his own. Mr. Parthenis paid the Garlics a modest buyout fee — nobody recalls how much — and the partnership dissolved.

Feeling somewhat burned but eager to move on, the couple eventually opened that restaurant with the dolphins, and two others, none of which sold gyros.

The Garlics moved to Orlando, Fla., in the early 1980s, where John sold subdivisions for a developer. He did well, but when he became sick, the family’s savings were drained to pay for treatments not covered by insurance. After her husband died, Ms. Garlic waited tables to support her children.

As gyros went nationwide and earned millions for a handful of entrepreneurs, the sight of rotisseries broke Ms. Garlic’s heart a little. “That was our idea,” she would think. She’s rarely discussed her and her husband’s role in Greek-American food history, but only because the subject rarely comes up. When it does, people think she’s kidding.

No hard feelings, though.

“What’s done is done,” she said. “We did other things with our lives, and we’ve got a lot of great memories.”

[derek]

I was joking about the spelling... but I had always thought the donair was from this region

There is now a place in Toronto that sells "Nova Scotian Donairs"

The Donair is certainly "from" this region (though it's roots go way back), but it's interesting how it seems to have been Lebanese-Nova Scotians who adopted Greek-American mystery meat to make it.

[canuck]

I remember reading this a few weeks ago.


http://thelapine.ca/another-enraged-mar ... ce-called/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

TORONTO – In what is becoming an alarming trend, a pizza place on Younge Street became the scene of an intense confrontation early this morning when an unidentified man from the Maritimes demanded to be served a donair, despite it not being on the menu.

The incident occurred at approximately 3 a.m. when a young man entered Ricky’s Rockin’ Pizza and asked for a “donny”, the east-coast late-night donair staple.

The clerk behind the counter was 17-year-old Jeff Morrow who had to first ask what a “donny” was and then had to tell the man that they didn’t serve donairs. The man quickly became enraged and said he wouldn’t leave until he was given one.

As terrified patrons looked on, the man grabbed a bottle of ranch dressing and one of Sriracha sauce and threatened to squirt if his demands weren’t met.

Onlookers tried to calm the man but he refused to listen, saying repeatedly that when he left the Maritimes his mother warned him to not to trust anyone west of Gaspé.

“How do you not know what a donair is?! Are ya stunnered?” he shouted at Morrow. He then calmly described the composition of a donair in lengthy detail, including stating that he wasn’t quite sure what kind of animal a “donair” actually was because he had never seen one in the wild.

He described donair as a “gorgeous lump of spinning meat more beautiful than the channel 13 weather lady.”

Police arrived to intervene after being called by patrons, but the man grabbed a bag of Ketchup chips and took off running into the night. As he disappeared into the darkness he drunkenly exclaimed “I’m the fastest man on Earth!”

Police Sergeant Don Donaldston told the Toronto Star that a similar incident took place in the early hours this morning at a pizza place across town. This second incident stemmed not from a lack of donair on the menu, but a lack of Garlic Fingers, “whatever the hell they are,” said Donaldston.

Police asked citizens to be on the lookout for a disheveled looking man in dirty jeans, a Halifax Mooseheads jacket, and a “Frizzel’s Autobody” hat.

Police also urged caution for Torontonians if approached by a Maritimer in any establishment that does not serve donairs.

[Araxi]

LOL, that's hilarious. Before I moved here I knew what a donair was from watching Trailer Park Boys but I didn't know wtf garlic fingers were.

[mr x]

Fake news but funny.

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 4

[wortly]

It was the Toulany's in Halifax who actually "invented" it in Halifax, AFAIK. The family used to own a butcher shop and being the innovative Lebanese folks that they are, they were looking for a way to make some money off of all of the trimmings at the end of the week. It is not a far stretch from kibbeh, but I have no idea where the idea for that delicious sauce came from. I was told the story by a Lebanese guy I used to fish with all the time down in the Valley. No idea whether it is true or not.

[GuingesRock]

I think you are talking about a Donair, which is a modification of a Doner kebab. Doner kebabs are traditionally made with minced lamb. They were modified and made of beef and sweet sauce was substituted for the usual hot sauce, to suit the tastes of this culture. That's the story as I know it, might be equally incorrect.

[jacinthebox]

http://donair.org/content/donair-history" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Velos Pizza, then located in Bedford, invented the "Halifax" donair in the 1971-1973 area. This "Halifax" donair was characterized by having a very sweet sauce, made from condensed milk, sugar, garlic, and vinegar.

Velos merged / was purchased / etc with King of Donair, thus giving King of Donair claim to being the first to introduce donairs to Canada, which they claim proudly to this day.

[CorneliusAlphonse]

I invented the donair in '68

[wortly]

http://donair.org/content/donair-history

Velos Pizza, then located in Bedford, invented the "Halifax" donair in the 1971-1973 area. This "Halifax" donair was characterized by having a very sweet sauce, made from condensed milk, sugar, garlic, and vinegar.

Velos merged / was purchased / etc with King of Donair, thus giving King of Donair claim to being the first to introduce donairs to Canada, which they claim proudly to this day.

Cool. I''ll fire this off to my buddy to see what he says. He actually owned a pizza place in the North End in the 80's.

[NASH]

I invented the donair in '68

You win!! Congratulations!!!

Now that's settled, how about you buy me a beer?

[GAM]

I thought you invented beer!

Sandy

[wortly]

I thought you invented beer!

Sandy

Nope, that was Brian Titus.

[Tony L]

I invented the donair in '68

You young whippersnapper, you weren't even born then

[GuingesRock]

I thought you invented beer!

Sandy

He improved the "sauce" around here.

Donair people didn't