Tarator (Bulgarian cold cucumber soup)
Recipe
The favorite of young and old summer, cooling, cold soup with yogurt and cucumbers. Preferred appetizer for mastic, ouzo or rakia. In the spring you can find it in a variant with finely chopped lettuce instead of cucumber, and in winter – with pickles.
Do you know what is most important in a tarator? I’ll tell you right before you start listing its products: they his. Walnuts. They are the additive that gives this traditional Bulgarian recipe a finished look and taste. Of course, garlic and dill are no less important.
You will probably be interested to know that yogurt appeared among the ingredients of tarator relatively late, in the middle of the last century. Before that, it is prepared on the basis of vinegar and water. At harvest or when there was other hard work in the field in the summer, more salt was added.
There are no rules for serving and consuming it. You can pour it into a glass as well as a bowl. You can eat it as an appetizer, but also in parallel with the main course. Moussaka, fried peppers with tomato sauce, chicken livers with onions or rustic are especially suitable for it.
Products:
- 1 cup yoghurt
- 2 cucumbers
- 2 cloves garlic
- ½ spring dill
- 50 g ground walnuts
- 30 ml sunflower oil
- 1 tsp. salt
- 1 pinch of black pepper if desired
Instructions:
- Peel the cucumbers, cut them into very small cubes or grate them on a large grater and place them in a suitable bowl or deep dish.
- Add the crushed garlic, finely chopped dill, salt and oil. If you like the taste, add black pepper.
- Beat the yogurt until smooth, pour it over the cucumbers, add water to achieve the desired density, and stir.
- Serve the tarator chilled and sprinkled with walnuts.
Caution: Contains walnuts, which can cause allergic reactions.
Caution: Contains yogurt, which can cause allergic reactions.
