Soups & chorba
Kurban chorba
Lamb soup made from the animal offered at a village saint's day and shared by everyone present.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 2 hr
- Total
- 2 hr 25 min
- Fasting
- Not suitable
Ingredients 17 ingredients
Method
- Rinse the lamb and the offal and put them in a large pot with the cold water. Bring it slowly to the boil and skim the grey foam from the surface until the broth runs clear.
- Lower the heat and simmer for about an hour and a half, until the meat pulls away from the bone. Lift it out, strip it from the bones when it is cool enough to handle, and cut it into small pieces. Strain the broth.
- Heat the oil in the rinsed pot and soften the onion, carrot, celeriac and green pepper over a low heat for ten minutes. They should turn translucent, not brown.
- Stir in the flour and tomato purée and cook for a minute, then add the strained broth a ladle at a time, stirring, so the flour does not seize into lumps.
- Add the rice and the dried hot pepper and simmer for fifteen minutes, until the rice is tender. Keep the soup loose — kurban chorba is a broth with things in it, not a stew.
- Return the meat and the offal, season with salt and pepper, and simmer for five minutes more.
- Beat the egg with the lemon juice and slacken it with two ladles of hot broth, then stir it back into the pot off the heat. If the soup is still boiling the egg will curdle into threads.
- Stir in the dill and parsley and serve straight away, with bread and a hot pepper on the side.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- Lamb neck and ribs on the bone
- any bone-in lamb from a halal, Greek or Balkan butcher; a boned shoulder on its own gives a thin, characterless broth
- Lamb offal
- leave it out and add another 200 g of bone-in meat — the soup is milder but still right
- Dried Macedonian hot red pepper
- one small dried chilli, or a good pinch of hot paprika stirred in with the tomato purée
