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Cooking With The DJ: Halifax Donair With Rhek

There’s shwarmas, gyros, and doner kabobs. None of these are Halifax donairs.

In this space, I'll be bringing you recipes and food stories from the globe's most cookin-est DJs, paired with carefully selected music for culinary enhancement. In my years in the music game, I have found DJs to be among the most discriminating food connoisseurs. This is no coincidence. When travelling, you're being taken to pre-gig meals, usually at a local flagship. When throwing parties in your own town, you're taking guests to dinner or hunting for late night eats. When home relaxing, you're making up for all the gut-buster airport tour food by whipping up some good home cooking. And of course, you're Instagramming it all.

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Today, Vancouver's Rhek teaches us how to make a Nova Scotian junk food specialty: the donair. The dude is a DJ, restauranteur, illustrator, and clothing store owner, so unsurprisingly, we had a pretty ecumenical exchange. Read on and learn everything you need to know about amphibian genital physiology, DIY gas station nachos, racist music categorizations, and obscure Canadian regional stereotypes. Oh, and he drew us a pretty picture of a donair (see above).

THUMP: Alright Rhek, rep your gastro-sonic credentials for us.
Rhek: I'm Rhek the DJ, half-man half-an-Asian, The Rice Cracker, Rhek Ross, Rhek James… or Alex. I'm a trill Nova Scotian with dual citizenship living in Vancouver, BC.

I DJ "black music," which used to actually be a real section in record stores when I was buying vinyl. I also do tons of graphic design, had a Ramen Pinball bar, co-own a clothing store and a traditional sushi bar, walk these dogs, and politik with the gods.

Yeah, overseas you still see "black music" bins in the record store. It's uncomfortable. Anyways, you indicated you'd like to share some food knowledge for up-and-coming DJs about to go on their first tour. Teach the seeds.

You can make Ramen instant noodles in coffee machines at motels and if you're truly balling you can even add chunks of gas station beef jerky to it. For a late night snack you can buy Cool Ranch Doritos at 7-11, open the back up and add the free liquid cheese, jalapenos, hot dog toppings like onions and bam! Ghetto nachos.

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I don't feel well. I'm having bad tour decision flashbacks. Any advice if you're into, you know, not treating your body like a garbage can?
Eat like Skratch Bastid—get salad instead of fries, avoid fast food in general, drink water, and eat a banana. When you do step up and eat in fancy restaurants you gotta do it right. Order the weird fancy shit. Sweetbreads, tartare, blood pudding, octopus, eel. Anything you don't make at home. And always get something deep fried. Restaurants exist because we don't have deep fryers at home. Basically, if you're ordering grilled chicken breast with lemon you should kill yourself because your world is the size of a frog's dick.

Frogs actually don't have dicks. I used to be a teaching assistant in a college biology lab and supervised frog dissections—my street cred on frog dick matters is pretty heavy. But the analogy still works because their genitals are internal, so this would mean that your world is so small it's actually occupying a negative amount of space. But we digress. What are we cooking right now? Frog dick?

The real Halifax donair. It's a staple of growing up in Nova Scotia and it's basically our only indigenous food. There's shwarmas, gyros, doner kabobs—millions of variations of meat on rotating spits, sliced on pita—but none of these are Halifax donairs. That's a fact not an argument.

Doniars have a unique sweet sticky sauce and an after taste that will remind you in the morning that you didn't hook up with a girl. Your sloppy 3AM donair was your consolation prize for not ending up in the drunk tank.

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No one makes donairs at home in "Hali." You can just buy them everywhere. Since I didn't knock up my high school girlfriend, I got to move away from Halifax, and I have found that anywhere outside of the Maritimes that says they're selling "Real Halifax Donairs" is actually selling lies. However my boy Jay O Smooth found a recipe on Youtube and vouched for it. I tried it and it's spot on for the most part. The guy who does the video is definitely a legit Scotian. All I did was modify his technique for rolling the meat out.

Do I have to be a genius to make this?
Nova Scotians invented the donair which means you barely need to be literate to make it—yet being able to fight is somehow an asset. The trick is to not get fancy and not deviate or re-invent this perfect flavor profile. Wanna add lettuce or cheese or hummus? Frig off! Also—and this is a must—put some water on the pita and pan sear it until it's dry and fluffy before you add the meat. Do not skip this step.

What should we be listening to while we cook this?
Nova Scotia is so isolated it's basically it's own country. To be authentic, the drunken Halifax national kitchen party anthem is basically "Barrett's Privateers."

The dudes in that video all look like they are into really deep modern disco but I guess they're just lumberjacks or something. I'm in a space disco group with the same name as the Canadian national police force, so when that brutal sea chantey is over, you can listen to this while you cook:

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Recipe

Sauce

1 can (300ml) sweetened condensed milk (not evaporated milk)

1/3 cup white vinegar

1 tsp garlic powder

Meat

2 lbs Lean ground beef

5 tsp bread crumbs

1 tsp salt

2 1/2 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp black pepper

3 tsp oregano

1/2 tsp cayenne

4 tsp dry chicken soup base mix

Toppings

Diced onions

Diced tomatoes

1. Prepare sauce by combining condensed milk, white vinegar and garlic powder and stirring. Set sauce aside.
2. Dice onions and tomatoes and set aside.
3. Preheat oven to 350F
4. Mix bread crumbs, salt, garlic powder, black pepper, oregano, cayenne and soup base mix together.
5. Add spice mixture to meat, mix thoroughly
6. Cut two sheets of parchment paper slightly bigger than your baking tray, oil with cooking spray.
7. Sandwich meat in between the two pieces of parchment paper. Roll it out with a rolling pin until 1/8" thick or thinner.
8. Transfer meat to baking tray, trim the sides to fit. This recipe should make appx 3 regular baking sheets of meat.
9. Bake meat at 350F for 10 minutes. Then broil 2 additional minutes to get it golden brown.
10. While meat bakes, prepare pita by wetting bread on each side (important!) and pan frying with a bit of oil, until bread is no longer wet but still soft.
11. Cut meat into 1" x 4" strips with pizza cutter or knife.
12. Layer ingredients on the pita - sauce, meat, tomato and onion and then more sauce. Wrap and eat!

Rhek is the owner of Vancouver's Sharks and Hammers, Sea Monstr Sushi and Rhek Creative. Follow him - @Rhek

Michael Fichman once ate a 4AM Doner Kebab wrapped in pizza in Berlin and felt terribly ill - @djaptone