Soups & chorba
Veal chorba
A thickened veal broth with root vegetables, sharpened with vinegar at the table — the standard kafeana soup.
Recipe from Туѓино Јабано
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 2 hr
- Total
- 2 hr 25 min
- Fasting
- Not suitable
Ingredients 17 ingredients
Method
- Put the veal and the bones in a large pot with the cold water, the peppercorns and a good pinch of salt. Bring it slowly to the boil and skim off the grey foam as it rises. Do that properly now and the finished chorba stays clear.
- Add the bay leaves and the dried hot pepper, lower the heat and let it tick over for about ninety minutes, until the meat gives way under a fork. Lift out the bones, push the marrow out and stir it back in.
- Add the diced carrot, celery, red pepper and potato and simmer fifteen minutes, then stir in the rice and cook until it is tender.
- Meanwhile make the zaprška. Warm the oil in a small pan and soften the onion and the grated carrot without letting them take colour.
- Sprinkle in the flour and stir for two minutes, until it smells nutty, then take the pan off the heat before the paprika goes in. Paprika scorches in seconds over a live flame and turns the whole pot bitter.
- Loosen the roux with a ladle of hot broth, whisk it smooth and stir it back into the pot. Simmer another ten minutes, until the soup is about the thickness of single cream.
- Fish out the bay leaves and the hot pepper, season with salt and stir in the parsley off the heat.
- Put vinegar on the table so each person sharpens their own bowl, which is how it is served in a kafeana.
If you cannot find it
Substitutions that work outside Macedonia.
- Veal shin
- Beef shin or oxtail, given an extra forty-five minutes; the collagen is what gives the broth its body.
- Macedonian sweet red paprika
- Hungarian sweet paprika. Avoid smoked pimentón, which takes the soup somewhere else entirely.
- Dried hot red pepper
- One small dried chilli or a pinch of flakes, added whole and removed before serving.
