Category Archives: Salma (Noodles w/Yogurt and Meat)

Salma (Noodles with Yogurt and Meat)

This recipe was to go with the noodles shown in Tiltin (Small Pasta Square) unfortunately the container in which the pasta was stored in had not been as dry as I had thought.  I ended up with fermented crumbling squares.  Soo…note to those making home made pasta, make sure the container is bone dry and stored some place that is also very dry.

I decided to post the noodle recipe as there aren’t that many recipes for noodles or pasta listed.  There is a really awesome picture (I am searching as I post this) of a Persian woman rolling out noodles on a table from a lump of dough.   An every day scene depicting dinner preparations of noodles.  What is so unusual is that medieval Middle Eastern cooking is rarely thought to actually have many noodle/pasta dishes!

With out further ado…an excellent pasta dish for either pasta squares or regular rolled out lengths of pasta (known modernly as spaghetti).

Salma

Noodle w/Yogurt and Meat

Translation:

Take dough, twist it, cut it in small pieces, and strike it like a coin with the finger, and cook it in water until done.  Then put yoghurt with it and fry meat with onions for it and put mint and garlic with it.

Rodinson, pp. 473

Ingredients:

1 C noodles (home made or store bought)

½ C yogurt       3 cloves crushed garlic  1Tbs mint

½ onion            1/3 lb chicken, beef, duck etc

My Redaction:

I had planned to use the home made noodles however the container used to store those in was not quite as dry as I had thought.  The home made pasta were no good so I had to rely on store bought noodles.

noodls yogurt spices

Here are all the ingredients for this dish.  I have 3 different types of meat on hand as I wanted to experiment with flavoring.  There is chicken and duck and beef.  Each was cooked in oil with onions.

cooking chicken w onions

This is the chicken with the onions.  Nothing special preparation wise.  In a skillet heat up some oil, add onions till translucent (or soft) then add meat.  Continue cooking till the meat is done.

While the meat was cooking I put the noodles into a pot of water with a little salt until the noodles were done.  I mixed the garlic with the yogurt and cooked the meat with onion.  Once everything was mixed or cooked, I put the noodles in a bowl, with the yogurt on top, then place the meat on the yogurt and sprinkled with mint.

noodles yogurt and cooked meat

This picture actually has a little of all three meats for a tasty comparison.  I really liked the chicken and the beef.  The duck was actually twice cooked.  The first time it was cooked in the the oven with the breast and leg meat being shredded into a bowl then fried with onions for this dish.  The duck was really really good.  By far my favorite!  Extremely time consuming though so if duck is what you want be prepared to spend a bit of time on this meat!