Soups & chorba
Tarana soup
A soup thickened with tarana, the dried flour-and-yoghurt grain households grated and sun-dried for the winter.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 15 min
- Cook
- 35 min
- Total
- 50 min
- Fasting
- Not suitable
Ingredients 14 ingredients
Method
- Melt the butter with the oil in a heavy pot and cook the onion gently until soft, without letting it brown, about eight minutes. Add the carrot, potato and garlic and cook for five minutes more.
- Move the pot off the heat and stir in the paprika, so that it colours the fat rather than burning in it. Return it to a low flame.
- Add the tarana and turn it in the fat for two or three minutes. Toasting it this way keeps the grains separate and gives the soup a nuttier flavour than throwing it straight into liquid.
- Pour in the stock and the water, stirring as you go so that nothing clumps on the bottom.
- Simmer, partly covered, for about twenty minutes. Stir often — tarana settles and sticks, and it will scorch in the time it takes to answer the door.
- Judge the thickness now. It should fall thickly from the ladle but still be a soup; add hot water a splash at a time, because it goes on thickening off the heat and again overnight.
- Season it, crumble in the dried mint, and serve with the cheese scattered over and the parsley last.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- Tarana
- Greek or Cypriot trahana, or Turkish tarhana, sold in Balkan and Middle Eastern shops.
- Kashkaval
- A young pecorino or a mild provolone, grated; the point is a firm sheep's or mixed-milk cheese that melts into strands.
- Sirenje
- A soft, wet feta, rinsed and crumbled.
