All recipes
Recipe
Norin
Hair-thin cold noodles and meat, a Tashkent speciality.
- Time
- 4 h
- Serves
- 6
- Home region
- Tashkent City
The story
Norin is Tashkent's own: a cold dish of noodles and boiled meat, both cut by hand into threads so fine they are almost hair. Horse meat and qazi, a horse-meat sausage, are the classic choice, though lamb and beef are common too.
It is a dish for mornings and celebrations, and for patience: the meat simmers for hours, the dough is rolled into thin sheets, boiled, and then everything is sliced by hand. In Tashkent there are small places that serve nothing else.
How it tastes
Cool, silky noodles and tender meat, sharp with black pepper and raw onion. A bowl of hot broth is served alongside, and the contrast between the two is the pleasure of it.
Ingredients
Serves 6
For the meat:
- 1 kg lamb or beef (or horse meat and qazi)
- 1 onion, bay leaf, a few peppercorns, salt
For the noodles:
- 500 g plain flour
- 1 egg
- About 200 ml water or cooled broth
- ½ tsp salt
To finish:
- 1 onion, sliced paper-thin
- Ground black pepper
- 2 tbsp of the fat from the broth
Method
- Cover the meat with water, bring to the boil and skim. Add the onion, bay leaf, peppercorns and salt and simmer for 2–2½ hours. Leave the meat to cool in the broth.
- Knead a stiff dough, rest it for 30 minutes and roll it into very thin sheets.
- Boil the sheets in the broth for 3–4 minutes, lift them out, brush with a little fat and let them cool.
- Stack the sheets, cut them into strips and then into threads as thin as you can manage.
- Slice the cold meat just as finely.
- Mix the noodles, meat and onion with pepper, salt and a little fat. Serve cool, with a bowl of hot broth on the side.
