Soups & chorba
Lamb chorba
The Easter-morning soup, cooked from lamb on the bone and turned sour at the end with yolk and lemon.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 1 hr 30 min
- Total
- 1 hr 50 min
- Fasting
- Not suitable
Ingredients 16 ingredients
Method
- Cover the meat with cold water, bring it to the boil, then tip the water away and rinse both the meat and the pot. That first grey scum is what makes a cloudy chorba.
- Heat the oil in the same pot and brown the meat lightly, lift it out, then cook the onion, carrots, celeriac and parsley root for about ten minutes.
- Take the pot off the heat and stir in the flour and the paprika. Return the meat, add the bay leaves, peppercorns and a litre and a half of water.
- Simmer, partly covered, for sixty to seventy-five minutes, until the meat comes away from the bone by itself. Skim now and then.
- Lift the meat out, strip it from the bones, chop it and return it to the pot. Check the salt and pepper.
- Whisk the yolk with the soured cream and the lemon juice, then temper the mixture: add a ladle of hot broth at a time, whisking after each one.
- Pour the tempered mixture into the pot off the heat, stirring as you go. From here on the chorba must not boil, or it will curdle.
- Stir in the parsley or dill, let it stand for five minutes and serve with bread.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- Lamb head or neck, as it is cooked at home
- Lamb neck on the bone, or bone-in shoulder chops.
- Macedonian kisela pavlaka (soured cream)
- Full-fat soured cream or crème fraîche.
