Piti

⏳ Time

15 hours 10 minutes + 8 hours

🥕 Ingredients

🍽️ Servings

Description

The recipe for piti is quite labor-intensive and time-consuming. However, you can use the same ingredients to make a similar soup in a regular pot—within about two and a half hours. In that case, it won't be piti, but rather a rich meat soup.

Ingredients

Lamb - 8.8 oz
Potato - 1 piece
Fat-tailed sheep fat - 1.1 oz
Onion - ¼ heads
Chickpea - 0.7 oz
Plums - 1 piece
Dried Rosemary - to taste
Salt - to taste
Ground Black Pepper - to taste

Step by Step guide

Step 1

The preparation for making piti begins with soaking the chickpeas — they should be left in water overnight. Just before starting to make the soup, you need to prepare the ingredients: cut a quarter from an onion, remove the membranes and chop the meat — using pieces from the tenderloin, brisket, shoulder, neck, and ribs (50 g each). It's important that the meat comes from different parts of the carcass: the brisket will add fat to the broth, while the neck and shoulder will enhance the flavor.

Step 2

In a tall, narrow clay pot, place pieces of meat along with sheep tail fat, dried plum, and onion. Fill with water nearly to the top, leaving about one centimeter from the edge. Put it on high heat and bring to a boil.

Step 3

When the broth comes to a boil, reduce the heat to the lowest setting and skim off the foam. At this point, add a little salt to allow the meat to season (but you should adjust the salt to taste at the very end). Let it simmer. (Important note: the broth should not boil vigorously, or it will become cloudy.)

Step 4

After three hours, add chickpeas to the soup (by the way, you can also use dry chickpeas, but in that case, you should add them at the very beginning when the broth comes to a boil) — and wait for another nearly five hours. Twenty minutes before it's done, add a potato to the pot. Finally, after seasoning with salt and pepper, pour in a tablespoon of saffron infusion (it's very easy to prepare: steep 1 gram of saffron in 250 ml of warm water and let it sit for an hour and a half).

Step 5

Pour the finished soup into a bowl and sprinkle with dried mint. Serve it with Goychay onion (Azerbaijani sweet onion resembling shallots) and sumac, which adds a tangy flavor. They are placed in separate bowls: the onion is eaten as is, while the sumac is added to the soup to taste.