Çiğ köfte
raw meat or vegan bulgur dish from Turkish cuisine
Çiğ köfte (Turkish pronunciation: [tʃiː cœfte]) or chee kofta is a kofta dish that is a regional specialty of southeastern Turkey in Urfa. The dish is served as an appetizer or meze.
Çiğ köfte is common to both Turkish and Armenian cuisine.
Traditionally made with raw meat, there are vegetarian variations made with bulgur, and in Urfa, a local meatless version is made with scrambled eggs. In Şanlıurfa province, locally prepared batches are sold by street vendors.
In 2008, public sales of çiğ köfte with raw meat were banned by the Health Ministry of Turkey due to health hazards, especially taeniasis, thus leaving only plant-based versions in shops and restaurants.
Etymology
In Turkish, çiğ means "raw" and köfte means meatball. The word köfte derives from Persian, ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European root "*(s)kop–" (grind, pound, beaten).
Preparation
Bulgur is kneaded with chopped onion and water until it softens. Ground beef or lamb, tomato paste and chopped parsley are then added and mixed until evenly dispersed.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Çiğ köfte” as raw meat or vegan bulgur dish from Turkish cuisine. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2444993. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2008.
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This entry incorporates text from “Çiğ köfte” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.