Kuurdak

the Kyrgyz pan of lamb and offal fried hard in its own fat with a great weight of onion, finished with broth and eaten with flatbread

Origin: Bishkek & the Kyrgyz Tian Shan

From the journey of Onion.

Kuurdak takes its name from the verb to fry, and it is the dish that follows a slaughter. When an animal is killed, the offal will not keep and cannot travel, so it is dealt with first: liver, heart, kidney, and lung are cut small, fried hard in the animal's own rendered tail fat with a very great quantity of onion, moistened with a little broth, and eaten the same day. The meat proper is dealt with later and at leisure. Kuurdak is therefore both the quickest dish in the Central Asian repertoire and the first thing anybody eats from a new animal. The onion is doing most of the work and this is why the dish hangs on it here rather than on the meat. It goes in by weight rather than by the onion, softens into the fat, and turns the whole panful sweet against the iron of the offal; a kuurdak with a timid hand on the onion tastes flatly of liver. Kyrgyz cooks add it in two stages, some early to melt away and some late to keep a little bite. Potato is common now and was not always. The older steppe version is meat, fat, onion, and salt, with nothing else in the pan; potatoes arrived with Russian settlement and were absorbed readily because they take up fat in much the way the onion does. Both versions are made and neither is considered incorrect. It is a shared dish across the region and the names track the borders rather than the recipe: Kyrgyz kuurdak, Kazakh kuyrdak, Uzbek qovurdoq, and further west a whole family of fried-meat preparations under cognate names. It is served straight from the pan onto a communal dish, with flatbread and with tea, and it is not a thing anyone eats delicately.

Ingredients

Meat

  • 400 g lamb liver, heart and kidney, trimmed and cut into 2cm pieces
  • 500 g lamb shoulder, in 2cm pieces

Fat

  • 150 g lamb tail fat, diced, or 4 tbsp oil

Onions

  • 700 g onions, sliced, in two halves

Potatoes

  • 500 g waxy potatoes, in 2cm cubes (optional)

To finish

  • 250 ml lamb broth or water
  • 1 small bunch dill or coriander, chopped

Seasoning

  • 2 tsp salt, or to taste
  • 1.5 tsp coarsely ground black pepper
  • 1 tsp ground cumin

To serve

  • 6 pieces flatbread, to serve

Method

  1. Render the diced tail fat slowly in a wide heavy pan or kazan over a low heat until the crisp scraps float and about half a centimetre of clear fat has run. Lift the scraps out and keep them.
  2. Turn the heat up. Fry the shoulder meat in the hot fat, in batches so it browns rather than steams, for about eight minutes a batch. Lift it out.
  3. Fry the offal next, and fast. Liver in particular wants three or four minutes over a high heat and no more; overcooked it turns grainy and bitter. Lift it out.
  4. Add half the onions to the pan and cook them over a medium heat for fifteen minutes, scraping up everything stuck to the base, until they have collapsed and gone deep gold.
  5. Add the potatoes if using and fry them with the onions for eight minutes until the edges colour.
  6. Return the shoulder meat with the salt, pepper, and cumin, pour in the broth, cover, and simmer for twenty minutes until the meat is tender and the potatoes are cooked through.
  7. The liquid should be almost gone by now, leaving a thick oniony coating rather than a sauce. Cook it down if not.
  8. Stir in the second half of the onions and cook for a further four or five minutes only, so they soften but keep some bite.
  9. Return the offal and the reserved fat scraps and turn everything through for two minutes to warm, no longer.
  10. Taste for salt, scatter the herbs over, and serve straight from the pan with flatbread and hot tea.

Notes

The offal is fried separately and returned at the very end, because liver held in a simmering pan for twenty minutes becomes grainy and no amount of onion will disguise it. Use the full weight of onion; it is the balance of the dish rather than a background aromatic. Lamb tail fat is what gives this its proper flavour and is sold by Central Asian and halal butchers, though oil will do. The potato version and the potato-free version are both authentic, the second being older. A kazan or any wide heavy pan matters more than usual here, since everything depends on browning rather than stewing.

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