Turkish Recipes: Kadın Budu Köfte (Lady Thigh Meatball)

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Kadın Budu Köfte – Lady Thigh Meatball. Hmm, well, where does this name come from? Ladies, I can’t help but think this particular type of köfte was named by a man who thought he was being humorous in declaring it resembled a woman’s thigh to his male counterparts before having a good old chuckle.

If anyone knows of any other theories (as that theory is purely my mind working overtime!) we’d love to hear from you.

Anyway, there’s usually a reason why we choose to do a particular blog post on any given day. Today’s post is a Turkish recipe for kadın budu because I made it last night for tea. It’s the first time I’ve ever made it and thankfully, it worked.

The reason why I decided to make it was because a portion of yesterday was spent browsing Istanbul hotels online. As you know, we’ll be heading up to Istanbul in just over a couple of weeks to take part in the Eurasia Marathon so it’s about time we found ourselves some digs.

When we went last year, we returned to Fethiye a few days later and headed straight for one of our favourite lokantas. On this particular day, they were serving kadın budu and it was just a pleasant welcome-back-to-Fethiye meal.

That meal popped back up in both our heads yesterday as we were were researching Istanbul so there was nothing for it but to go out, buy some meat and give it a go.

A Turkish Recipe for Kadın Budu Köfte

The main ingredients for kadın budu are really simple; minced beef or lamb, rice, egg, onion, parsley. Those are the basics and then you can play around with adding extras. Some people add cheese or dill. Guess what we added? Yes, that’ll be chilli flakes.

This recipe made 10 kadın budu köfte so you can increase the ingredients if you’re cooking for a lot of people.

• First of all boil a quarter cup of rice till the water evaporates and leave to one side to go cold. You can follow our Turkish rice recipe for this and omit the şehriye.
• Finely chop a medium-sized onion and begin to saute in a frying pan. Take 250g of minced beef and add around two thirds of this to the pan, leaving one third behind for later.

• Once the meat is cooked and the juices have evaporated, add it to a large plate and leave to cool. As you can see in the top left photo, I added a few hand-chopped dry chillies at this point. This is an optional extra.
• Once cooled, sprinkle salt and pepper and roughly chopped parsley over the top of your meat.
• Now add your rice and the remaining raw minced beef to the mixture.
• Beat an egg, pour that over and then mix it all up.

And now, here comes the messy bit. If you’ve followed a recipe for köfte in the past and thought it was a bit messy on the hands, this one is even better.

• Knead your mixture for a few minutes to make sure all the flavours infuse.
• Now take large golf ball pieces of mixture, form them into a ball in your hand and pat down to make little patties. You’ll have rice and meat stuck all over your hands but it’s all part of the fun.
• Set the köfte out on your large plate and leave to chill in the fridge for 30 minutes or so. The köfte will be quite loose at first but this helps them to set.
• After 30 minutes, sprinkle both sides of each köfte with flour.
• Beat an egg and heat a little oil in a non-stick frying pan.
• Now dip each köfte into the beaten egg and gently lay in the frying pan. Fry gently for about 5 minutes on each side. I did ours in two batches and kept the cooked ones warm in the oven.

As you might imagine, kadın budu can be very filling so we served ours with a simple salad of lettuce, rocket and cherry tomatoes dressed with a little vinegar and olive oil. A traditional shepherd’s salad would also make a erfect accompaniment.

Now, take a look at some more Turkish recipes.

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