Now let’s cook
Naryn. The meat and the noodles are cut into thin straws, and the broth is served on the side.
Ingredients
- 600 g boneless beefbones taken out, then simmered in one piece until tender, cooled and cut into thin straws
- 2000 ml waterplain drinking water
- 2 tsp fine saltordinary table salt
- 1 egglarge hen’s egg, about 50 g without the shell
- 80 ml waterplain drinking water
- ½ tsp fine saltordinary table salt
- 300 g plain wheat flourwhite wheat flour, called all-purpose in the US
- 4000 ml waterplain drinking water
- 2 tsp fine saltordinary table salt
- 80 ml sunflower oila neutral-tasting oil
- 1 tsp ground black peppermixed into the noodles and meat and sprinkled on the onion
- 1 tsp ground cumina powder of cumin seed
- 150 g onionyellow onion, cut into half-rings
- 2 pinches ground black peppermixed into the noodles and meat and sprinkled on the onion
- 100 g kazya sausage of horse rib meat with its fat, simmered for 2–2.5 hours before serving (buy it already cooked)
Method
Bring 2 l of water to the boil, add 2 tsp of salt and put in the beef. Turn the heat down and simmer the meat for about 1.5 hours, until it is tender: the thickest piece should read at least 71 °C.
Take the beef out onto a plate and let it cool. Leave the broth in the pot: it is for serving.
For the dough, beat the egg with 80 ml of water and ½ tsp of salt. Do not taste the raw dough: it has raw egg in it. Put 300 g of flour in a bowl, pour in the mixture and knead a stiff dough.
Roll the dough into a ball, cover it with a bowl and leave it for 1 hour.
Roll the dough out into a sheet 2–3 mm thick and cut it into rectangles of about 10 × 20 cm.
Bring 4 l of water with 2 tsp of salt to the boil in a large pot. Lower the sheets in one at a time: when a sheet floats, cook it for 10–15 seconds more and lift it onto a kitchen towel. Leave the sheets until they lose their shine.
Oil a chopping board. Stack the sheets on it in piles of 5–6, brushing each with oil (80 ml in all). Cut each pile into ribbons about 3 cm wide, then into thin straws 2–3 mm wide, and put them in a bowl.
Cut the cooled beef into the same thin straws and add it to the noodles. Sprinkle with 1 tsp of black pepper and 1 tsp of cumin and mix well.
Slice the onion into thin half-rings and sprinkle it with a pinch of pepper.
Bring the broth to the boil. Slice the kazy thin and heat the slices in the boiling broth to 74 °C, until they are hot all the way through.
Heap the noodles and meat on flat plates and put the onion and the kazy slices on top. Serve the broth separately, in deep bowls.
Where this dish comes from
Cuisines of several Turkic-speaking peoples, Kazakh included
Naryn is a traditional meat dish of some Turkic-speaking peoples. It belongs to the Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbek and Uyghur cuisines: boiled meat, onion and, as a rule, finely cut noodles. In Kazakh cooking naryn is often made from the leftovers of the day before’s boiled meat, the et. It was cooked on the second day after the feast where beshbarmak was served: the meat, the noodles and the broth were taken from the beshbarmak, but naryn has long been a dish of its own and is cooked separately.
