Soups & chorba Fasting
Lentil chorba
A thick fasting soup of brown lentils and paprika, eaten right through Lent and on any cold day.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 1 hr
- Total
- 1 hr 20 min
- Fasting
- Suitable
Ingredients 16 ingredients
Method
- Rinse the lentils in a sieve under cold water and pick out any grit. Brown lentils do not need soaking; red ones would collapse in this soup.
- Cook the onion in the oil in a large pot over a medium heat until soft and beginning to turn gold, about ten minutes. Add the garlic for the last minute.
- Pull the pot off the heat and stir in the paprika. It needs the oil to release its colour, but it scorches in seconds over a flame, and scorched paprika is bitter all the way through the soup.
- Return the pot to the heat, add the carrot, pepper and tomato and cook for five minutes. Then add the lentils, potatoes, bay leaves and water.
- Bring it to the boil, turn it down and simmer, half-covered, for 40 to 50 minutes, until the lentils are soft and some of them have broken down and thickened the broth.
- Season with salt and pepper now that the lentils are soft, and stir in the dried mint, crumbling it between your fingers as it goes in.
- Add the vinegar and the ajvar off the heat, at the very end. Acid put in early keeps lentils stubbornly firm however long they cook. Stir in the parsley and serve with bread and raw onion.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- Ajvar
- A roasted red pepper blended to a paste with a little oil and a pinch of chilli.
- Dried Macedonian red peppers, sometimes broken into the pot
- A dried mild chilli such as a ñora, added with the water.
- Dried mint
- Dried oregano, or a teaspoon of fresh mint chopped in at the very end.
