🇹🇷 Turkey · Family: Pide · Region: Samsun (Bafra)
Bafra Pidesi is the Black Sea flatbread from Bafra, in Samsun province: round, thin, and distinct from both the boat-shaped pide of other regions and from lahmacun. This record's emphasis is shape and identity, a pizza-like round, baked thin, that belongs to the Black Sea kitchen rather than the southeastern or central traditions. It reads as its own thing precisely because it refuses the familiar templates.
The make is about getting a thin round right. Dough is worked and rolled or pressed into a flat circle, topped, and baked hot until the base sets and the rim takes color. The round form matters: unlike the closed or boat pide that is folded around its filling, the Bafra style stays open and flat, closer in silhouette to a thin pizza, while staying clearly separate from lahmacun in dough and handling. Good execution shows in the base and the bake, the dough should be thin and evenly rolled with no thick doughy center, baked through so the bottom is firm rather than pale and slack, and the edge should carry some structure without going to cracker. Sloppy versions roll unevenly so part of the round stays raw and gummy, under-bake so the whole thing droops, or pile the top so heavily the thin base cannot support it. The defining test is whether it holds as a crisp, even round you can lift a slice of without it folding limp.
Within the Black Sea, this is understood as a regional specialty with its own following, defined by being thin, round, and not lahmacun. Other pide forms, the boat-shaped and closed styles in particular, are built on different geometry and deserve their own article rather than being crowded in here. Bafra Pidesi earns its name by being a flatbread that the rest of Turkey's pide map does not quite account for.
More from this family
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