What is chuchvara?
Chuchvara is the small boiled dumpling of Uzbek home cooking. You may also see it spelt chuchwara or chichvara. It is an everyday dish, the kind of thing cooked for a weekday family lunch.
The dough is unleavened: flour, water and salt, sometimes with an egg. It is rolled out thin and cut into small squares. The filling is chopped or minced lamb or beef with a generous amount of onion, salt and black pepper, and many cooks add zira, the Uzbek name for cumin.
Chuchvara is small: our recipe cuts the dough into squares of about 3 cm and puts a pinch of filling the size of a bean on each. A bowl of soup holds a couple of dozen of them.
What are Uzbek dumplings called?
Chuchvara is one of several Uzbek dumplings. These are the names you are most likely to meet:
- Chuchvara: small and boiled, served in broth or with qatiq.
- Manti (also spelt manty): large dumplings steamed on stacked tiers and eaten by hand.
- Qovoqli manti: manti filled with pumpkin, common in autumn.
- Tuxum barak: a speciality of Khorezm, boiled, with a filling of egg and milk.
Samsa sometimes appears on the same lists, but it is a pastry. The dough is layered with butter and baked in a tandoor or a hot oven instead of being boiled or steamed. Our beef samsa recipe shows how different the method is.
How chuchvara is shaped
Each dumpling starts as a square of dough. A pinch of filling goes in the middle, the square is folded corner to corner into a triangle, and the two outer corners of the triangle are brought round and pinched together. The result is a small, plump parcel with the tip of the triangle standing up.
Rest the dough under a cloth for half an hour before rolling, so it rolls out thin without springing back. Keep it thin, or the dumplings turn heavy, and pinch the edges firmly so that no filling escapes into the pot.
Three ways to serve chuchvara
Whichever way you serve it, chuchvara is cooked the same way. Drop the dumplings into boiling liquid, stir once so they do not stick to the bottom, and cook them until they float, then a couple of minutes more.
In broth: chuchvara shurva
Cooked and served in broth, chuchvara becomes a soup: chuchvara shurva, also written chuchvara shurpa (in Uzbek, chuchvara sho'rva). The dumplings go straight into the pot and give the broth their juices, so one bowl is both soup and main course. Our chuchvara recipe makes a tomato broth from beef on the bone, with carrot, onion and zira.
A clear lamb broth, started the way you would start a lamb shurpa, works just as well. Either way, finish each bowl with chopped dill or coriander leaves and black pepper.
Chuchvara shurva belongs to a whole family of Uzbek broths and rice soups, covered in our guide to Uzbek soups.
Drained, with qatiq or suzma
Boiled in salted water and drained, chuchvara goes into a bowl with a spoonful of qatiq, the Uzbek soured milk (katyk in Russian), or suzma, which is qatiq strained until thick. Chopped herbs and black pepper go on top.
If you cannot find qatiq, plain unsweetened yoghurt is the nearest match. Soured cream is common too, and it is what our recipe suggests.
Fried
Chuchvara is sometimes fried after boiling. The drained dumplings go into a hot pan with a little oil and are turned until the edges are golden and crisp. This is also a good way to use up dumplings boiled earlier in the day.
Manti: the large steamed dumplings
Manti are the big dumplings of the family, and they are steamed rather than boiled. The shaped manti sit on a stack of perforated tiers over boiling water. In Uzbek the steamer is a qasqon, often written kaskan; Russian speakers call it a mantovarka.
The filling is meat chopped by hand with a knife, mixed with a lot of onion and often with tail fat, dumba in Uzbek and kurdyuk in Russian. The fat melts as the manti steam and keeps the filling juicy. Our steamed manti recipe uses equal weights of meat and onion.
In autumn, pumpkin manti (qovoqli manti) are common, filled with diced pumpkin and onion. The same sweet, dense pumpkin goes into pumpkin samsa.
Manti are eaten with the hands, straight from the platter, with qatiq or soured cream and a sprinkling of black pepper.
Tuxum barak from Khorezm
Tuxum barak comes from Khorezm, in the north-west of Uzbekistan. Tuxum means egg, and the filling is a beaten mixture of egg and milk. Since the filling is liquid, each dumpling has to be sealed carefully before it goes into the water. Tuxum barak are boiled and served with butter.
Chuchvara vs manti
- Size: chuchvara is small and manti are large. Our recipes cut 3 cm squares for chuchvara and 10 cm squares for manti.
- Cooking: chuchvara is boiled, in water or in broth. Manti are steamed.
- Filling: both use lamb or beef with plenty of onion. Manti filling is chopped by hand and often includes tail fat; chuchvara filling can be chopped or minced.
- At the table: chuchvara is eaten with a spoon, often in broth. Manti are eaten by hand.
Chuchvara vs pelmeni
Chuchvara looks like a small cousin of Russian pelmeni, and the two are often mixed up. Home cooks vary, but these are the usual differences:
- Size: chuchvara is smaller, often about half the size.
- Filling: both are filled with meat, but chuchvara filling tends to have more onion and often zira.
- Cooking: both are boiled. Chuchvara often cooks in the broth it is served in; pelmeni more often cook in salted water.
- Serving: pelmeni come with soured cream, butter or vinegar. Chuchvara is served in broth, or drained with qatiq and herbs.
Making a batch and freezing it
Shaping is the slow part, so it makes sense to make more than one meal's worth at a time. Our recipe uses 400 g of flour and feeds four, allowing 20 to 25 dumplings a bowl.
- Freeze them raw. Lay the shaped dumplings on a lightly floured board or tray, not touching, and put them in the freezer until hard.
- Bag them. Once they are frozen solid, tip them into a freezer bag. Frozen this way, they do not stick together.
- Cook from frozen. Drop them straight into boiling broth or salted water without thawing, and give them a few minutes longer than fresh dumplings.
Manti freeze the same way: raw, on a board, then into a bag. Steam them from frozen and add a few minutes to the cooking time.
Chuchvara or manti: which to make first
If you have a steamer, manti are the easier start: there are fewer dumplings to shape, and once they are on the tiers there is little to do but wait. Chuchvara needs no special equipment, only more patience at the shaping stage.
Where to buy the ingredients in Riga
- Meat: lamb or beef, plus tail fat if you are making manti. Arkan Bazar's halal meat pre-order, with mince in the planned range, is launching soon. The meat is produced in Latvia, elsewhere in Europe and in Scandinavia.
- Spices: zira and black pepper for the filling, and zira with coriander seed if you make a tomato broth.
- Herbs: dill and fresh coriander, which Uzbeks call kashnich. Buy them on the day and chop them just before serving.
- Qatiq and suzma: ask at the stall. The page for Arkan Bazar, the Uzbek bazaar at Riga Central Market has its location and opening hours.
Chuchvara is small and boiled; manti are large and steamed. Both are built on meat and plenty of onion.