How to cook beshbarmak, every experienced housewife should know. This is a very popular dish of Turkic nomadic peoples, which is made from lamb, horse meat and beef. In the literal translation, the name of this dish means “five fingers”, therefore it was always with hands that we ate this dish.
Features of Beshbarmak
This article will show you how to make beshbarmak. This is a traditional meat and flour dish, which is common among many Turkic-speaking peoples. Most often, it is prepared on the occasion of the reception of honored guests or at holidays and celebrations.
At its core, beshbarmak is a boiled meat mixed with noodles cooked using a special technology, which allows you to achieve the taste inherent in this particular dish.
Dish history
By the way, beshbarmak is precisely finely chopped meat, the tradition of serving it in this form has very ancient roots. It was believed that this is a sign of special respect for the guests, which the owners of the house show, especially they worshiped the elders, they chopped meat, because it was difficult for old people to chew it. That is why they tried to crush him as finely as possible.
If the meat was poorly chopped, it was regarded as a sign of disrespect for the guests or as an elementary inability to cook this dish.
Classic recipe
Nowadays, you can find this dish in any kitchen, because many people know how to cook beshbarmak at home.
The meat in this dish is very well cooked, served on the table hot along with noodles, which are cooked in the same meat broth. It is also customary to sprinkle beshbarmak with stewed onions, which are cut into large chunks.
In order to figure out how to cook beshbarmak, you will need the following ingredients:
- 1.5 kilograms of meat;
- a kilogram of homemade sausages;
- 5 medium sized tomato;
- 7 onions;
- bay leaf, which must first be washed with running water;
- salt and pepper peas to taste.
This amount of food is enough for 5 servings. Note that one kilogram of dough will also be required.
Cooking process
Talking about how to cook beshbarmak at home, let us first start with the instructions on which we will make a special dough for this dish.
To do this, mix half a kilogram of flour with approximately 250 ml of water and carefully salt. It is also recommended to break one chicken egg, but some believe that you can do without it to make the dough as fresh as possible. The dough is kneaded and used for beshbarmak.
Now we will directly understand how to cook beshbarmak. You need to take a large pan in which to place a whole piece of meat, pour it with water and bring to a boil. When the water begins to boil, be sure to remember to remove the foam, which can appear over and over again.
When the meat is boiled a little, add bay leaf, peppercorns and salt. After this, the meat must be cooked for about two hours. Gradually put sausages in the pan and also cook for about two hours. When these basic ingredients are brought to a state of full readiness, they are removed from the broth, waiting for them to cool, and cut into small pieces.
After that, the dough prepared for beshbarmak needs to be rolled out as thinly as possible and cut into strips or small squares. Pieces of dough are placed in boiling broth for five to seven minutes. When the dough is cooked, it is pulled out using a slotted spoon.
At the same time, onions and tomatoes are cut into large enough slices and spread in a pan. After pouring a small amount of meat broth, they need to be put out.
Just before serving, the sausage and meat must be heated in the broth. One of the main conditions for beshbarmak to be tasty and nutritious is to serve it hot. After that, put dough, sausages and meat on a wide dish, sprinkle with stewed onions and tomatoes on top. If necessary, you can sprinkle it with fresh herbs, and pour broth into separate bowls by adding sauce with sheep’s cottage cheese and garlic.
Chicken Beshbarmak
Recently, a dish based on chicken is gaining more and more popularity. This article describes how to cook beshbarmak at home. The recipe is not very complicated, but it will require a lot of time. Chicken is spread on pre-prepared fresh noodles and sprinkled with plenty of onions.
If you have mastered the classic recipe, then you can try this method. And it will help to cook beshbarmak at home with the step-by-step recipe presented below. Well, first you need to stock up on the necessary ingredients.
In order to make beshbarmak with chicken, you will need these products:
- big chicken;
- 4 onions;
- 2 cups of flour;
- peppercorns;
- Bay leaf;
- vegetable oil;
- water;
- salt.
Chicken Based Beshbarmak
To begin with, thoroughly wash the chicken under cold running water and put it in a large pan. If it does not fit in it, then the chicken is allowed to be divided into several parts.
Bring the chicken stock to a boil, remove the foam and add spices. The meat should be completely cooked, and the broth should be saturated, so it’s better to cook it for as long as possible. Experienced chefs advise doing this for at least three hours.
In parallel, we begin to cook noodles, which is an integral part of beshbarmak. Knead dough from half a glass of water and two glasses of flour, this mixture must be salt. When the dough is infused, it needs to be rolled out and cut into squares or wide strips, which need to be boiled for five to seven minutes in chicken broth.
Stew the onions in a frying pan until half ready, sprinkle them with noodles laid on the chicken. We emphasize that for the preparation of chicken beshbarmak meat must be cut into small small pieces, without separating them from the bones. This dish was taken with broth from special oriental bowls.
Pork beshbarmak
In addition, it is possible to cook beshbarmak exclusively from pork. We will present the recipe and photo of the dish below. But first, we note that, in fact, it is very similar to the classic version, which is extremely common in Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries.
For its preparation, the following components will be necessary:
- 2 kilograms of pork;
- 6 onions;
- 3 small carrots;
- peppercorns and bay leaves;
- fresh greens;
- salt to taste.
Mastering a new recipe
Now we will tell you in detail how to cook beshbarmak at home (see the photo of the dish below) using this recipe. We put the whole pork in a pan with water and bring it to a boil. Be sure to wash the meat before doing so.
During boiling water you will form a foam, which must be removed regularly. After that, carefully salt the broth and leave over low heat, it should cook for about three hours, the meat for beshbarmak should be as soft as possible.
About 40 minutes before it is ready, dip the carrots, chopped into strips, onion, divided into two parts, as well as bay leaf and pepper. After the meat is cooked, be sure to get out of the pot and vegetables. For now, put them aside.
We will prepare for this time a noodle dough by mixing two glasses of flour, half a glass of water (or a little more), a chicken egg and salt. The finished dough needs to be cooled, for this it is placed in the refrigerator, and then rolled out and cut into small pieces. They are boiled for several minutes in a broth prepared on pork.
By the way, this broth must be filtered through cheesecloth before serving, and then brought to a boil again. Only after that it can be served in the main dish.
How to serve
We hope that you should have thoroughly figured out how to cook beshbarmak. According to the recipe, it is served on a table on a large, but not very deep dish. The meat must be cut into small pieces and put the bottom of the dishes, previously covered with noodles. Then lightly sprinkle pork on top with onion, which should be slightly darkened on the same broth. Then sprinkle the whole dish with plenty of fresh herbs.
Serve the broth to the table in special bowls or wide circles; finely chopped greens are also added to it.
Tips for housewives
Now that you already know how to cook beshbarmak (a step-by-step recipe and photos, we hope you have come in handy during the cooking process), it will be useful to find out some tips that will help you prepare a delicious dish every time. These are certain tricks that every experienced chef has.
For example, it is important to pay close attention to the choice of meat. Often for lamb beshbarmak they choose lamb, but it has one unfortunate property. It cools too quickly. Because of this, the dish loses its original value. Therefore, horse meat is still considered ideal for this recipe.
At the same time, any meat for beshbarmak is always cooked to such a state that they practically fall apart in the hands. This dish is convenient to eat if you concentrate it not on the entire surface of the noodles, as is recommended in many recipes, but in the very center, a small slide.
Before you start boiling the noodles in the meat broth, it is necessary to sprinkle the pieces of dough with flour so that they dry out a little, so they will not stick together during cooking.
Always cook the meat in a pan, always under a closed lid. In this case, the museum will be more fragrant and rich. As you can see, preparing it is not difficult at all, but it takes a lot of time. Fragrant beshbarmak will surely fall in love with both adults and children.
Interesting Facts
Beshbarmak is a popular dish in our time not only in Central Asia, but also in Russia. Recently, a lot of interesting master classes have been held on its preparation, records are being set that contribute to its popularization.
For example, in 2013, the largest teapot was prepared in a Moscow teahouse called "Kazan". In fact, this is the Uzbek analogue of Beshbarmak. Naryn is popular among the Turkic peoples; it is finely chopped boiled meat, which is always cooked with onion sauce, and noodles are often added. The capital's Naryn was included in the Guinness Book of Records, because its weight was 500 kilograms.
Surprisingly, in Kyrgyzstan there is even the so-called Beshbarmak index. With its help, the salaries of citizens in different regions of the country are compared, translating them into the natural equivalent - the ingredients needed to prepare this dish.
Beshbarmak records
But the largest beshbarmak in Kazakhstan was prepared in 2015. As part of the celebration of the Capital Day of this state, they spent about 700 kilograms of meat on Beshbarmak, whose total weight was 736.5 kilograms. This achievement is also included in the Guinness Book of Records.
But the largest beshbarmak in the world appeared recently. In 2018, this dish was made in Bishkek, weighing almost one and a half tons. The largest chuchuk, whose length was more than 110 meters, was attached to it. By the way, Chuchuk is a special home-made sausage made from horse meat. The meat of eight horses went to their preparation. A competition was also held among men for the best ability to chop meat, which is especially appreciated in the preparation of this dish.
Conclusion
We talked in detail about how to cook beshbarmak. Photos of dishes and the best recipes presented in our review, we hope will help you cope with this task in your own kitchen.