Soups & chorba
Chicken soup
Clear chicken broth with root vegetables and tarana, finished off the heat with egg and lemon.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 20 min
- Cook
- 2 hr
- Total
- 2 hr 20 min
- Fasting
- Not suitable
Ingredients 13 ingredients
Method
- Put the chicken in a large pot, cover it with the cold water and bring it slowly to the boil. Skim the foam carefully for the first ten minutes — starting from cold and skimming patiently is what keeps the broth clear.
- Add the whole onion, the bay, the peppercorns and the salt. Lower the heat until the surface barely trembles, and cook for an hour and a half. A rolling boil emulsifies the fat and clouds the soup.
- Lift the chicken out, let it cool enough to handle, and strip the meat from the bones in bite-sized pieces. Strain the broth and skim the fat from the top.
- Return the broth to the pot with the carrot, parsley root and celeriac and simmer fifteen minutes, until the vegetables are tender but still holding their shape.
- Add the tarana and cook for about eight minutes, until soft. Return the chicken meat and let it heat through.
- Beat the eggs with the lemon juice in a bowl. Ladle in hot broth a spoonful at a time, whisking constantly, until the bowl is warm.
- Take the pot off the heat and pour the egg mixture back in a thin stream, stirring. It must not boil after this, or the egg curdles into threads.
- Season, stir in the parsley and serve at once with bread.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- Tarana
- Orzo, broken vermicelli or Greek trahana; all cook in roughly the same time.
- A farmyard hen
- A free-range chicken with a couple of extra wings thrown in for gelatine. A supermarket bird gives a thin, pale broth.
- Parsley root
- A small parsnip, which is sweeter, or a second piece of celeriac.