Avgolemono: The Greek Soup That Teaches the One Technique Every Cook Should Know

Avgolemono means egg-lemon, and it is both a sauce and a soup. The sauce goes over stuffed vine leaves, meatballs and artichokes; the soup, which is what most people mean by the word, is chicken broth thickened with rice and finished with the same emulsion of beaten egg and lemon juice. The result is pale, velvety and sharp, with the body of a cream soup and none of the cream. It is what Greek families make for the ill, the cold and the hungover, and it takes forty-five minutes if the broth is already made.

The technique

Eggs whisked into hot liquid scramble. Eggs whisked with lemon juice and then brought up to temperature gradually, by adding hot broth to them a ladle at a time before returning the mixture to the pot, thicken instead, because the proteins set slowly and evenly rather than seizing. This is tempering, and avgolemono is the purest lesson in it. The starch released by the rice into the broth helps stabilise the emulsion, which is why the soup is more forgiving than the sauce. Two rules cover almost every failure: never let it boil once the eggs are in, and never stop whisking while the broth goes into the eggs.

Ingredients, for four

• 1.5 litres good chicken broth, ideally from a poached bird, with 200 to 300 g of the cooked chicken shredded
• 100 g short-grain rice, or orzo
• 3 eggs, at room temperature
• Juice of 2 lemons, about 80 ml, plus more to taste
• Salt and white pepper
• Dill or parsley, chopped, to finish

Method

1. Bring the broth to a simmer in a wide pan, add the rice and cook until tender, fifteen to eighteen minutes for rice, eight to ten for orzo. Season the broth properly at this stage; it is hard to adjust later without disturbing the emulsion. Add the shredded chicken to warm through.
2. Take the pan off the heat and let it stop bubbling entirely.
3. In a large bowl whisk the eggs until frothy, then whisk in the lemon juice.
4. Whisking constantly, add a ladle of hot broth to the eggs in a thin stream. Then another. Then two more. The egg mixture should now be warm to the touch and noticeably thinner.
5. Pour the tempered mixture back into the pan in a stream, stirring. Return to the lowest heat and stir for two or three minutes until the soup thickens enough to coat the back of a spoon. It must not boil. If you see the first bubble, pull it off.
6. Taste. It should be sharp; add more lemon if it is merely pleasant. Adjust salt. Finish with white pepper and herbs and serve at once.

Notes

The soup does not reheat gracefully. Warmed gently it is fine; boiled it splits into curds and thin broth, and nothing brings it back. Make it to eat, and if there is any left, reheat it in a bowl over simmering water rather than in a pan.

Separate the eggs if you want it lighter: whisk the whites to soft peaks, fold in the beaten yolks and lemon, and temper as above. The soup will be frothier and paler and will hold slightly less well. Whole eggs give a more custard-like result that most cooks prefer.

The broth is everything. A stock cube produces a thin, salty soup that the eggs cannot rescue. Poaching a whole chicken with an onion, a carrot, a bay leaf and peppercorns for an hour gives you both the broth and the meat, and the method is the same one used in our chicken kabsa recipe, where the poaching liquid goes on to cook the rice. Related egg-lemon preparations appear across the eastern Mediterranean, in Sephardic Jewish cooking as agristada and in Turkish and Arab kitchens under other names; the Greeks did not invent the idea but they made it the national soup. The lemon, incidentally, is not decorative: sharpness is the character of the dish, and a timid version is a failed one. The same holds for the garlic in our toum recipe, another emulsion that punishes the cautious.