The World That Was - Urartian Yoghurt Soup

Hello and Welcome to The World That Was!

This week, I made another dish from Urartian society - a warm yoghurt and barley soup. Although it's mostly referred to as Greek Yoghurt - at least in Ireland anyway - stained yoghurt was common to the societies of the Bronze Age Near East, not just Greece!

In any case, let's take a look at The World That Was! Follow along with my YouTube video above!

Ingredients

1 cup barley

1 onion, diced

1/4 cup mint, chopped

1/4 cup parsley, chopped

butter

3 scallions

2 cups Greek yoghurt / strained yoghurt

2 eggs

salt

pepper

4 cups / 1L water

Method

1 - Boil Barley

To begin with, we need to cook our barley. Pour about 4 cups or about a litre of water into a pot, along with your cup of barley. Place this onto a medium-high heat, and let it simmer for about 20 minutes. Remove it from the heat, but keep it warm.

2 - Prepare the Mint and Onion

While your barley is cooking, go chop your fresh mint by picking leaves off the sprigs, and rolling them into a ball in your hands, before roughly chopping them. Then, go dice an onion into small pieces. Do this by making 2 or 3 cuts into the end of an onion, before rotating it and making 2 more. Then, slice this lengthways into small diced pieces.

Toss the mint and onion onto a pan with some butter, and sauté these for about 10 - 15 minutes. When this is done, go toss this into your pot with the barley.

3 - Prepare the Yoghurt Base

Pour your strained yoghurt into a heatproof bowl. Crack two eggs into this, and beat everything together until you stop seeing streaks of egg in the mix. Take a ladle of your heated barley soup, and spoon it into the yoghurt. This is to temper the mix, and helps prevent the eggs from scrambling when you add it. Do this two or three times, mixing everything vigorously as you’re streaming the liquid into the yoghurt mix.

4 - Combine the Ingredients

When the yoghurt is tempered, go add it all back to your pot with the barley. Put your soup onto a medium heat, and bring it to a bare simmer as you continually stir it. This will take about 5-10 minutes, or until it thickens up slightly.

Chop a small handful of chives, and a bunch of parsley, and stir them into your soup about 5 minutes before you serve it up

Plate up in a lovely bowl, garnish some mint, and dig in! The finished dish has a mild sourness, thanks to the yoghurt, which really offsets the taste of the onions and chives. When served hot, it has a very sharp flavour, but when left to cool to room temperature, the flavours became much more mild and mellow, so serve this up either way, depending on what you personally want from the flavour profile. The barley absorbs a lot of the liquid here, so the finished soup turned out more like a savoury porridge, so adjust this if you want a thinner or thicker soup. A similar dish is made by modern Assyrian populations in Iraq, Syria, and Iran, which suggests that this culinary tradition migrated from the Caucasus through Mesopotamia at some point in the Bronze Age. The modern dish is known as booshala