North Africa · Volume 15, Harissa and the Ottoman Line
Chorba beida
Algiers
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 45 minutes
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Algerian soup runs on a binary that organises the entire repertoire: chorba beida, white, against chorba hamra, red. It is white because tomato has been deliberately excluded, in a country whose interior cooks almost nothing without it. That exclusion is the Ottoman city speaking. If you cook this and it tastes thin, the fault is almost never the missing chilli. It is the missing smen and the missing broth.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 45 minutes.
Ingredients
- 250 g minced meat, or chicken
- 50 g lsan el teer (bird's tongue pasta) or vermicelli
- 2 onions, diced
- 1 handful chickpeas, soaked overnight
- 1 celery branch
- 1 poultry stock cube
- 2 tbsp oil
- 1 L water
- 1 tbsp flour
- a handful each; 1; to taste parsley and coriander; 1 lemon; salt, pepper
Method
- Sweat the onion in the oil until soft and pale. Do not colour it. Browning would put a red note into a white soup.
- Add the chickpeas and celery, crumble in the stock cube, add the water, and simmer 30 minutes.
- Meanwhile bind the minced meat with minced parsley, the flour, salt and pepper, and roll into walnut-sized balls. Brown them lightly, or drop them straight into the broth.
- Once boiling, rain in the pasta and cook 10 minutes more.
- Remove the celery, adjust the seasoning, and finish with coriander and lemon juice.
Notes
After a published Algerian source.
What a modern chef changes
A real broth, smen instead of the cube, and the pasta timed to the table
Rungs 6, 3 and 1
Method
- Replace the stock cube, because it is doing all the work and doing it badly. In a soup with no tomato, no chilli and no browning, the broth is the entire dish. Carcass and wings in cold water, brought slowly to 90°C and held three hours without ever boiling, skimmed, strained, reduced by a third. A boiled stock emulsifies its fat and goes cloudy, which is exactly wrong for a soup whose name is its colour. This change is worth more than all the others combined.
- Finish with smen, off the heat. A teaspoon of aged clarified butter at the end supplies the funk this repertoire is built on and that oil cannot. Without it the same soup tastes like an under-seasoned minestrone with the tomato left out.
- Cook the pasta to the table, and put the lemon on it too. Lsan el teer keeps swelling in hot broth, so a chorba that has stood twenty minutes is porridge: add it ten minutes before people sit down. The lemon wedge on the side is Rung 6, and the traditional service anyway.