Persia and the Caucasus · Volume 12, The South Caucasus and the Disputed Table
Dushbara
Azerbaijan
An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.
- Time
- 1 hour
- Researched
- 8 sources cited
- Reviewed
- Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
- Cooked
- Not yet cooked and reported
Tiny meat dumplings in broth, and a dish that carries its own folk standard for how good is good enough.
As tradition built it
Serves 4. About 1 hour, plus resting.
Ingredients
- 500 g flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 2 eggs
- 80 to 200 ml warm water
- 250 g spiced minced lamb, for the filling
- to taste dried mint, to serve
- to taste garlic vinegar, to serve
Method
- Combine the flour, salt, eggs and water to a firm dough. Rest.
- Divide into 6 to 8 balls, roll each to 0.5cm thickness, and cut into 3cm squares.
- Place a small amount of spiced minced lamb centrally on each square.
- Pinch two opposite corners together, then pinch the two resulting corners of the triangle to each other, forming the traditional small ring shape.
- A real, oft-repeated proof-of-skill measure: a traditional saying holds that if forty dushbara don't fit on one spoon, the cook's skill is in question, a folk metric for how small they should be cut and folded.
- Cook in simmering broth until the dumplings float and the filling is cooked through.
- Serve in the broth with dried mint and garlic vinegar offered at the table.
What a modern chef changes
The broth clarified with the same patience khash's long extraction demands.
Rung 5
Method
- Build a proper, clarified broth as the base, a long, gentle simmer of bones and aromatics, skimmed carefully, rather than a quick stock, since dushbara is a dish where the broth is doing as much work as the dumpling.
- Cut and fold to the traditional size deliberately, using the forty-on-a-spoon standard as an actual target rather than a saying, since undersized, precisely folded dumplings cook more evenly and hold their shape better in the finished broth.
- Offer the garlic vinegar and mint at the table, not in the pot, exactly as tradition has it, so each diner controls the dish's final balance.