Hasip (Хасип)
Lamb’s casing filled with chopped meat, rice and onions, then cooked in a flavoured broth. A speciality of Samarkand and Bukhara.
| Lean lamb (shoulder) | 500 g |
| Lamb’s tail fat (kurdjuk) | 150 g |
| Short-grain rice, rinsed | 250 g |
| Onion, sliced | 150 g |
| Fine salt | 20 g |
| Ground cumin | 6 g |
| Ground coriander | 4 g |
| Ground black pepper | 3 g |
| Red chilli powder | 2 g |
| Fresh dill, chopped | 20 g |
| Lamb’s (or ox’s) large intestine | — |
- Preparing the meat: Chop the lamb coarsely with a knife into 1 cm dice, not with a mechanical mincer. Knife chopping preserves texture and keeps the mixture from turning pasty. Cut the tail fat into small 5 mm dice.
- Preparing the rice: Rinse the rice several times until the water runs clear. Do not cook it: it will cook inside the sausage during the poaching and absorb the meat juices.
- Mixing: Combine the chopped meat, the diced fat, the raw rice, the sliced onion, the dill, the salt and all the spices. Mix by hand for 5 minutes to distribute the ingredients well. The mixture should be homogeneous but not compact.
- Resting: Refrigerate for at least 2 hours so that the spices penetrate the meat.
- Cleaning the intestine: Clean the lamb’s large intestine carefully. Turn it inside out, scrape it, and rinse it several times in cold salted water. Soak for 30 minutes.
- Stuffing: Fill the intestine only two-thirds full: the rice will swell considerably in cooking and will burst the casing if it is overfilled. Tie the ends and ligature the body at regular 15 cm intervals.
- Cooking: Plunge into a lamb broth flavoured with onion and cumin. Bring to the boil, prick lightly if bubbles form, then cook at a simmer for 1½ to 2 hours. The hasip is cooked when the rice is tender and the sausage firm to the touch.
- Serving: Slice into rounds of 3 to 4 cm. Serve hot with nan (the Uzbek flatbread), fresh tomatoes and green tea. The cooking broth is served separately as a soup.
The hasip is a sausage of the cities, which sets it fundamentally apart from the kazy or the chuchuk, nomad preparations born of the need to make use of the whole animal in itinerant conditions. The hasip comes from Samarkand and Bukhara, millennial cities of the Silk Road, where the sedentary kitchens had time to develop more elaborate preparations. The incorporation of raw rice and fresh dill, unthinkable in a nomadic preparation, betrays this urban origin.
The decisive technical constraint is the rice dosage. Worked in raw, it swells considerably during poaching as it absorbs meat juices and broth. A casing more than two-thirds full inevitably bursts under this pressure. Knife-chopping, rather than mechanical mincing, preserves the texture of the diced meat and keeps the mixture from turning pasty, which would hamper the rice’s ability to absorb it.
The lamb’s tail fat, the kurdjuk, is the ingredient that gives the hasip its richness. Taken from the tails of the Karakul and Sarabi sheep raised in the steppes, it melts at a lower temperature than ordinary suet and imparts a characteristic unctuousness to the rice. The variants differ in the rice-to-meat ratio and the use of coriander: the Samarkand version is richer in rice and more coriander-scented, while the Bukharan puts the meat and the cumin further forward. The zone’s introduction develops the technical parallel between the hasip and the Egyptian mombar or the Tunisian osban.
The hasip appears at the dastarkhan, the great festive Uzbek table, alongside the plov (the national dish of rice and meat) and the samsas (small stuffed pastries). The cooking broth, rich in gelatine and fragrant, is served separately, as a soup.
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