Norwegian & Icelandic · Soup
Kjötsúpa
- Easy
- 25 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
A quiet dish that lets its main ingredient speak: season well and stand aside.
Ingredients
- 1.2 kg lamb shoulder and neck on the bone, cut in 5 cm pieces
- 2.5 litres cold water
- 200 g onion, in chunks
- 300 g swede, in 2 cm dice
- 300 g carrot, in 2 cm rounds
- 400 g potato, in 3 cm chunks
- 60 g rolled oats
- 300 g white cabbage, in wide strips
- 4 g dried wild thyme
- 16 g fine salt
The skills inside
Skimming: foam, fat and a clear brothKnife cuts: dice, julienne, bias
Allergen screen
None found among the 14 screened.
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Cover the lamb with the cold water and bring it up slowly without stirring, skimming the grey foam from the surface until what rises is clean and white.
- Salt, add the onion and swede, and hold at about 90C (195F) for an hour, until the meat is loose on the bone.
- Add the carrot, potato, oats and thyme and simmer 20 minutes, until a knife slides into a potato with no resistance and the broth has thickened enough to cling to a spoon. 20 min
- Drop in the cabbage for the last 7 minutes so it keeps its sweetness and a little bite. 7 min
- Rest off the heat 10 minutes, lift the fat that pools, correct the salt, and ladle broth, meat and roots into the same bowl. 10 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes
- It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
- The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
- Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
- The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
- Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.
Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.
Knife cuts: dice, julienne, bias 150 recipes
- Take any three pieces from anywhere in the pile: they match closely enough in every dimension that you would have to measure them to argue otherwise.
- The cut faces are flat and clean rather than ragged or crushed; leaves and herbs are cut through, not bruised, and the board carries no dark smear where they were.
- The stated size is the actual size, held against a rule or a known reference rather than called about right.
- Everything in the pile is the shape that was asked for: no wedges, no half pieces, and no offcuts swept in to avoid waste.
- They cook evenly, which is the entire point: at the end of cooking nothing is still raw and nothing has collapsed.
Where it goes wrong The knife was dull, or the vegetable was never squared off first, so the pieces vary: the small ones are mush by the time the large ones are cooked, and the dish has two textures where it wanted one.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Cabernet or Rioja Reserva
- Also Right
- Malbec
- From the Taps
- Porter
- Zero-Proof
- Pomegranate spritz
Lamb’s sweet grass-fat wants structure: tannin from Cabernet, smoke-echo from Rioja’s oak, or Syrah’s pepper for the spiced routes.
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