Cold yoghurt soup
The one Turkish soup drunk cold. Nothing can split because nothing is heated — but the chickpeas and wheat have to be cooked first.
This page says how to make it For what it is, where it comes from and the mechanism →
Soups · Eastern Anatolia · Under 30 minutes · Seasonal · Budget
- Preparation
- 15 min
- Cooking
- 0 min
- Resting
- 60 min
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Cost
- Very cheap
- Season
- Summer
The summer soup of Erzincan, Tunceli and Erzurum: the cold member of Anatolia’s yoghurt soups and probably its oldest. Because no fire is involved there is no liaison to make — splitting was casein contracting under heat, and with no heat there is no problem. The cooling effect in summer is not folklore: a large volume of cold liquid genuinely lowers body temperature, even if it does so by mass rather than by evaporation.
Method
- Boil the wheat and chickpeas beforehand and cool them completely: a hot grain curdles the yoghurt.
- Whisk the yoghurt loose.
You will need: A wide bowl · A whisk
-
Whisk the yoghurt with the cold water until no lumps remain.
Look for It should be the consistency of milk and one even colour.
Why Yoghurt is a gel, and a gel does not take up water without being broken mechanically; all the water at once leaves lumps. -
Add the cooled wheat and chickpeas with the salt and stir.
Look for The bowl should feel cool to the hand.
Why The grains must be completely cold: a single warm one raises the yoghurt’s temperature locally and curdles it just there.If it went wrong
If it has started to curdle, whisk twenty seconds more and put it in the fridge — cold partly brings it back. If it has gone completely, strain it and serve the grains instead.
Starch still asleep The granules are just floating there doing nothing. No body arrives before 62 °C.
A gluten web is forming Gliadin and glutenin hydrated into an elastic net. This is what will hold the gas. no way back
Salt · 0.41% Low. Everything reads flat and nothing steps forward.
-
Add the grated cucumber, the mint and the dill, and chill for an hour.
Look for It wants to be at 8–10 °C and is drunk straight from the fridge.
Why Dried mint opens up in water in about twenty minutes, and before that its taste sits on the surface. An hour lets both the mint and, in a soup with no garlic in it, the dill spread through.Starch still asleep The granules are just floating there doing nothing. No body arrives before 62 °C.
A gluten web is forming Gliadin and glutenin hydrated into an elastic net. This is what will hold the gas. no way back
Salt · 0.38% Low. Everything reads flat and nothing steps forward.
This recipe was run through the engine step by step — what goes in when, and at what temperature and for how long. The reactions above come from that run.
peak 12 °C · 67 minutes · engine 1.0.0 · confidence low
What can go wrong here
The yoghurt sauce curdled⌄
What happened
The yoghurt passed 85 °C. The casein micelles lost their charge, the protein clumped and released the water it was holding. Once split, it does not come back.
By the numbers
Stabilise 500 g of yoghurt with a tablespoon of starch and one yolk, stir in one direction, never boil.
Without a thermometer
Catch the threshold by eye: the moment a few large bubbles appear on the surface you are around 85 °C, take it off. The sauce is ready when it coats the back of a spoon — draw a line with your finger and the line should hold.
After the heat goes off
Ice cold in a deep bowl, with a cube or two of ice for whoever wants it. No bread needed.
Two days in the fridge. The cucumber releases water and the soup thins; on the second day add another spoon of yoghurt.
It is not reheated. The soup is cold by design, and heated it will certainly split.
Not for the freezer: ice crystals tear the yoghurt gel apart.
Strained, the leftovers turn into a grain salad; the liquid is drunk as a cold ayran.
Suitable from twelve months and easy to drink in summer. For 12–36 months crush the chickpea skins and soften the wheat well, and lift their share before the salt. Yoghurt suits a baby under one, but whole wheat grains do not.
- Hulled wheat → Coarse bulgur Bulgur stands in for hulled wheat and cuts the boiling to fifteen minutes.
- Cucumber → Purslane Purslane is common in the east: less water and a more definite texture.
- Cold The method this recipe rests on
- Yoghurt What it does in heat, water and acid
- Hulled wheat What it does in heat, water and acid
- Chickpea What it does in heat, water and acid
- Yoghurt and rice soup Similar method, or something that sits on the same table
- Tutmaç soup Similar method, or something that sits on the same table
- Under 30 minutes Other recipes that answer the same need
- Seasonal Other recipes that answer the same need
- Budget Other recipes that answer the same need
What it tastes like
No axis sits clearly above the average: a balanced recipe.
This profile is computed rather than measured: the role-weighted average of its ingredients’ taste vectors, shifted by what the cooking does. The thin line is the database average on that axis.
Closest in taste
Not hand-picked: ranked by distance across the eight taste axes.
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