Gundruk soup

Ingredients

• Gundruk — or fermented greens80 g
• Potatoes400 g
• Soybeans — soaked overnight100 g
• Onion1
• Tomatoes2
• Garlic5 clove
• Ginger20 g
• Turmeric1 tsp
• Dried chillies3
• Fenugreek seeds1 tsp
• Timur pepper1 tsp
• Mustard oil50 ml
• Saltto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Soak the gundruk in warm water for ten minutes and squeeze it out, keeping the water.

   12 min

2. 2

   Toast the soybeans in a dry pan until they darken in patches and crack.

   10 min

3. 3

   Heat the mustard oil until it smokes, take it off and let it cool a minute; raw mustard oil is acrid.

   5 min

4. 4

   Fry the onion, garlic, ginger and turmeric, add the tomatoes and cook five minutes.

   10 min

5. 5

   Add the gundruk, soybeans and potato, and pour in the soaking water and a litre of water.

   6 min

6. 6

   Cook twenty-five minutes, until the potato and beans are soft, and season.

   27 min

7. 7

   Sizzle the dried chillies, fenugreek and timur in a spoon of oil and pour it into the soup.

   6 min

About the dish

Gundruk is mustard or radish leaf fermented without salt and dried. Its sourness is enzymatic rather than vinegary, and sauerkraut substitutes only approximately.

Dried gundruk is soaked for ten minutes only. Longer, and it loses some of its acidity into the water, and the acidity is what the soup is made for.

The soup is finished with chilli and fenugreek fried in oil at the very end. That tarka gives an aroma that boiling never produces.

Worth knowing

• — Fenugreek burns within seconds. It goes into the oil last, once the chilli has darkened, and the pan comes straight off the heat.
• — Timur, the Nepali relative of Sichuan pepper, gives a faint numbing. Sichuan pepper substitutes; ordinary black pepper does not.
• — Gundruk is made at home: the leaves are bruised, packed into a jar without salt, kept warm a week and then dried in the sun.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

320 kcal

Protein

14 g

Fat

14 g

Carbs

36 g

More from Nepal

• Momo — Nepali steamed dumplings of buffalo or chicken with an achar of charred tomato.
• Dal bhat — Lentil soup with rice and a vegetable tarkari. Nepal's everyday meal, eaten twice a day for a lifetime.
• Sel roti — A ring of fermented rice batter deep-fried crisp outside and soft within.