Doner kebabs

[rogerzilla]

How do you feel about the mystery meat in pitta bread?

No shish, chicken or sexual euphemisms please - this is about doner kebabs with lots of cabbagey salad and chilli sauce.

[Eccentrica Gallumbits]

I wouldn't even eat them before I was vegetarian. Besides, nobody ever actually does eat them. People buy them, sort of wash their face a bit with them, and then drop them on Rankeillor Street.

[Fab Foodie]

They're fine by me 

[Paul]

I like some of them. 've found a place that I'm happy to eat them from stone cold sober. My only complaint is the ratio of 'meat' to salad: too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

It's worrying when the 'meat' is so cheap that they skimp on the salad.

But which sauce do you have?

[Tail End Charlie]

I like to have a Johnny Cash (Ring of Fire) or one that makes me feel like the map at the beginning of Bonanza.

[andyoxon]

Had my last doner in Leicester while at university (+20yrs).  Not enticing enough now.  Lasting memory was of a flatmate getting fairly irate, when having a load of people round in the flat one w/e, he ended up with a doner when he'd 'ordered a shish'....

[jogler]

I like to have a Johnny Cash (Ring of Fire) or one that makes me feel like the map at the beginning of Bonanza.

a raging ear worm

[Tewdric]

No rabbit food.  All the sauces.  Bring 'em on.

[ferret]

when given the chance a large doner all the trimmings and chilli sauce hit's the spot,
haven't had one for ages

[Psychler]

I've voted for "I eat them sober" purely because there is no option for "they are the breakfast of the gods, should be included with bread, eggs and milk as a staple and also supply several of my 4-a-day"

Drooling as we speak!!!

Edit:  Plus chilli sauce obv.

[Valiant]

I've voted for "I eat them sober" purely because there is no option for "they are the breakfast of the gods, should be included with bread, eggs and milk as a staple and also supply several of my 4-a-day"

Drooling as we speak!!!

Edit:  Plus chilli sauce obv.

This. Though I prefer the PFC style where done like normal doner and then put on a griddle with chilli sauce, lemon juice and cooked again.

[fred the great]

Never heard of them in Bangkok.

[Torslanda]

My body started out as a temple but turned into a skip . . .

When I started out eating doner kebab, 30 some years ago, they tended to be made on the premises so recipes and constituents and even textures differed from shop to shop. From memory, the best in BangladeshRochdale was on Milkstone Road, adjacent to the railway bridge and the worst by far was some green neon pit adjacent to the 'miserable bike shop' and that's all the clue your getting

Later in the 80s we discovered Rusholme, where establishments were open until silly o'clock AM and the variation was just as wild. You could embark on a night out and see the weekend in on a drip . . .

Now that they're all supplied by 'Istanbul Catering' or 'Doner King' the texture, colour and taste are all the same. Now they're universally cut with a rotary knife one hankers for the 'cut with a hot carving knife' texture of the old days. Nostalgia just isn't what it used to be. 

Valiant! Challenge for you. Hugh 'Fearlessly-Eats-It-All' once had a 'gastro-bike' which was a Raleigh RSW with added charcoal grill and the fan off a turbo trainer. He cooked rook on it. Your next project should be a 'doner-bike'. Should do well, late nights around Kings Cross, don't you think? 

And after all that you'll have to excuse me, I need a beer anna kebab. And it's a long drive from Limoges . . .

[Valiant]

Ah the BBQ idea I had was bad enough :S

[ian]

They make me a little bit scared.

They overturn all known laws of food safety. Reheating? Only for a few dozen times until strimmed down to the metallic core. Refrigeration? What? They just sit there turning, hot, then cold, then hot. If you did that to normal meat it would rise up like some microbial zombie and chase you.

I've not eaten a proper one for years but I did use to love them. Hell, we used to eat the frozen ones from Diamond Frozen Foods in Tuebrook, but we were students and thus the alcohol levels in our blood meant it would probably qualify as disinfectant. They were great, you microwaved them and, as we did have any vegetables, just double the amount of chilli sauce. Truly the supper (and breakfast) of champions.

Real ones, with vegetable matter and a full meaty calorific load were a treat of stupendous wonder to end a boozy night. I do confess that one hung-over morning in Edinburgh I thrust my hand into my trenchcoat pocket and straight into another pita pocket of half-eaten congealed kebab. It might not have been so bad if it hadn't happened on the bus and I had to keep my hand embedded in cold kebab until I got off. As my [Scottish] flatmate pointed out, he would have eaten it.

I also have a very dim recollection of a kebab from Rusholme. I foolishly demonstrated my bravery to a girl (who I suspect was less impressed than she ought to have been) by requesting extra chilli sauce. More, more, more, I fervently declared, until the resulting kebab looked like a chilli volcano. I managed it. The next morning the entire lower part of my face was numb. And yellow. It wasn't a day that got any better. You can only put off the toilet for so long.

They're slightly better quality in North America (the 'donair' in Canada, some variety of gyro in the US usually) so you can actually eat them without shame. I do like to tango with the risk of dysentery every now and then with a lamb gyro from a NYC street vendor.

[Julian]

My body is hardly a temple but doner kebabs are an abomination.

I went to university in Ye Olde Towne of Oxenforde, which boasts amongst its assets some jolly nice architecture, a dreaming spire or three, some of the worst nightclubs known to man and about six dozen assorted kebab vans.  I think the kebab van owners and the nightclub owners were in cahoots: in order to enjoy a night out at Park End, or the rather too aptly named Filth, it was necessary to get so drunk that a kebab on the way home began to seem like a good idea.

I still vividly recall the one - and only - time I actually ordered a doner kebab from the kebab van.  I had already begun to sober up as the van owner began to saw long strips off something that resembled a prosthetic leg wrapped in a support stocking.  Despite covering the thing in copious amounts of chilli and garlic sauce, I was unable to avoid the distinct corpse-like smell of the meat, which brought me back to biology lesson dissections on a warm day, not helped by the oddly squashy texture.  I managed one piece of the meat and quite a bit of the salad, before giving the rest of the meat to a less fussy friend. 

I'm not a squeamish type, but that has to rank as one of the most disgusting things I've ever tried to eat, like a grilled lab-grown tumour.  I stuck to chips 'n' cheese after that. 

[Fab Foodie]

I heard a story on the wireless some years back of a poor sap who had to make the tough choice between spending his last change on the bus home or the kebab van.  Being pissed the answer was obvious, kebab, but he thought that armed with the kebab he could amble the length of the town to the cashpoint, get more cash, and wander back to get another bus. 
The cashpoint was one of those old types with a sliding screem that uncovered the workings when you insert your card.  All was well, the cashpoint was open, but being pissed he kept entering the wrong number, whereapon the machine kept his card and the glass descended ending his session ... unfortunately, his beloved Doner which he'd put down was now trapped behind the glass .....
T'was a long walk home.
 

[jogler]

Foul food,not fit for even the devil's diet

[hellymedic]

I don't go out much so seldom eat these things.
>10 years ago, when rather fitter, I got hungry cycling on the way home from Central Middlesex Hospital. I stopped for a kebab in Wembley and had all the extras.
The MS had left my tongue numb so I could eat the green chilli with impunity...

[rogerzilla]

I heard a story on the wireless some years back of a poor sap who had to make the tough choice between spending his last change on the bus home or the kebab van.  Being pissed the answer was obvious, kebab, but he thought that armed with the kebab he could amble the length of the town to the cashpoint, get more cash, and wander back to get another bus. 
The cashpoint was one of those old types with a sliding screem that uncovered the workings when you insert your card.  All was well, the cashpoint was open, but being pissed he kept entering the wrong number, whereapon the machine kept his card and the glass descended ending his session ... unfortunately, his beloved Doner which he'd put down was now trapped behind the glass .....
T'was a long walk home.
 

When I used to run our Mutley Plain branch in Plymouth, I found a kebab festering in the morning sun under the ATM perspex one morning.  Now it's all explained.

Roger's Profanisaurus has "kebabble" as the incoherent drunken nonsense late night street food vendors have to put up with.  Who hasn't been virtually incapable of speech at the end of an evening and found themselves in front of 20 different salad items at the local kebab van?

"Doner pleash."

"What would you like on that, sir?"

<weighs this up and realises there is no way I am going to be able to enunciate what I really want, which is most of the salad items, except the tomatoes because they're not ripe, not too much cabbage and no jalapenos>

"Everyfink."

Sometimes simple is best.

[spesh]

I've had doners from time to time, but even the best ones never came anywhere near to the gyros that I had whilst on an exchange trip to West Germany. Plus, as ian alludes to, there's the food safety aspect to consider.

In the nowadays rare event of being caught on the North End Kebab event horizon, it's lamb shish or a burger, depending on how much change I have left.

[hellymedic]

When I was drunkest in Glasgow, pakora was the food to satisfy midnight munchies; food of the (waddling) gods!

[ScumOfTheRoad]

Pakora! Now you're talking. And the lovely mint sauce you dip it in.
Why can't you get proper pakora in London?

[Charlotte]

Even as a lifelong vegetarian, I've put some truly disgusting things in my mouth over the years.  But the concept of the doner kebab leaves me feeling queasy.  These days, Mr Felafel in Soho is about the limit of my pitta-based foul food cravings (it's the garlic cauliflower that keeps me coming back for more...)

Incidentally; does anyone remember the Viz 'Doner Card'?

"In the event of my death, I would like someone else to have my kebab."

[Valiant]

I love doner, I love chilli sauce but not the stuff thats seedy and tangy. But add garlic sauce to either and I wouldn't touch it.