🇷🇴 Romania
Ciorbă de burtăRomanian tripe soup
A Romanian ciorbă of beef tripe boiled with bones and root vegetables, soured with vinegar and finished with a liaison of sour cream, egg yolk and crushed garlic, served hot with more sour cream, garlic-vinegar sauce and hot pepper.
Origin and history
Ciorbă de burtă is among the best-known Romanian soups: Adevărul's survey of favourite ciorbe lists it, noting that almost every Romanian has eaten it at least once. The writer Radu Anton Roman published a version built on beef tripe, shank, trotters and a finish of garlic, egg yolk and sour cream. The sources consulted give no date or origin.
Make it at home
- Makes
- 6 servings
- Total time
- 7 h 30 min
- Hands-on
- 1 h
Ingredients
- 600 g1.3 lb beef or veal tripe (burtă), ideally already white-cleaned
- 1.2 kg2.6 lb beef shank and cow's trotters (ciocănele și picioare de vacă), bones cracked by the butcher
- 3 l3 quarts water, plus extra to top up
- 1 large onion, finely chopped
- 1 carrot, grated
- 1 parsnip, grated
- 120 ml1/2 cup vinegar, plus more at the table; start with less
- 1/2 head garlic, pounded with a little salt
- 1 egg yolk
- 120 ml1/2 cup sour cream (smântână), plus more to serve
- 1 small bunch lovage (leuștean), chopped
- 2 tbsp cornmeal (mălai), for scrubbing the tripe
- 1/2 tsp baking soda, for the overnight soak
- salt and black pepper, to taste
- hot peppers, garlic-and-vinegar sauce (sos de usturoi cu oțet), to serve
Method
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1. The evening before, put the cracked bones and trotters in a pot with the water, bring to a boil and skim. Simmer for 3 hours.
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2. Meanwhile wash the tripe, trim away the fat, peel off any wrinkled outer skin, and cut it in pieces. Rub it with the cornmeal and a splash of vinegar, then leave it overnight in cold water with the baking soda.
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3. Lift the bones from the broth. Pick the meat off, keeping the cartilage, and return the meat and cartilage to the broth. Refrigerate overnight.
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4. Next morning, drain and rinse the tripe, add it to the broth and top up with water to 3 l. Simmer for 3 hours, until a piece cuts easily.
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5. Lift out the tripe, cut it into strips about 1 cm wide and 3 cm long, and return it to the pot with the onion, grated carrot, parsnip and vinegar. Simmer for 1 hour more, topping up with water if the broth drops too far.
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6. Mix the crushed garlic with the egg yolk, sour cream and a ladle of cooled broth. Take the pot off the heat and stir this liaison in so it does not curdle.
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7. Season with pepper, salt and more vinegar if needed, scatter lovage and serve hot with sour cream, hot peppers and garlic-vinegar sauce.
Notes
- Radu Anton Roman's recipe (as published by BZI) is built on two days: bones one evening, tripe the next morning. Tripe from a butcher is often pre-boiled, as Newsweek România assumes, which saves some of the cleaning; the simmering time that makes it tender still has to be judged by cutting a piece.
- The souring is vinegar, as in the Roman and Newsweek recipes. Keep the soup below a boil once the liaison is in, so the cream and yolk do not curdle.
- Serve with sour cream, hot peppers and a garlic-vinegar-cream sauce on the side so each person adjusts to taste, as BZI and Newsweek suggest. Newsweek also mentions adding crushed garlic at the end and optionally a grated boiled carrot for colour.
- Roman says it can be made without the shank and trotters by raising the amount of tripe.
- Quantities are Roman's scaled down to about 60 percent (his: 1 kg tripe, 2 kg shank and trotters, 5 l water, 200 ml vinegar, 200 ml sour cream, 2 egg yolks, a large head of garlic, 500 g of onion, carrot and parsnip).
Adapted from BZI: Ciorbă de burtă după rețeta lui Radu Anton Roman and Newsweek România: cum se face ciorba de burtă după rețeta tradițională.
At the festivals
No festival we list has printed it on a menu yet.