Yayla Corbasi | Turkish Yogurt Soup

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Ultra creamy, satisfying and filling, Yayla Corbasi is a delicious Turkish yogurt soup that can be a great change from your all time favorite chicken soup when you're fighting a cold or looking for some simple comfort food to dig into.

Yayla soup is made using yogurt, rice, stock and a few other simple pantry essentials.

It's rich, creamy, and subtly flavored, making it a great dinnertime option for the entire family!

This yogurt soup is an essential part of Turkish cuisine, and while you might come across several variations of this soup all over Turkey, the base of the soup still remains the same.

If you're hosting a get-together, this light and comforting soup can be a great appetizer to serve. You can serve it with a few toppings and sides to make it a fun and interesting experience for everyone.

The soup is so simple and easy to put together, you can also enjoy it as a light dinner when you want to dig into something nourishing, healthy and flavorful.

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What's So Great About the Recipe?
Ingredients For the Turkish Yogurt Soup
How to Make the Yayla Corbasi
Substitutions & Variations
💭Top Tip
Equipment
How to Store the Leftover Turkish Yogurt Soup
Tips & Tricks to Nail the Recipe
How to Serve the Yayla Corbasi
FAQs
Related Recipes
Yayla Corbasi | Turkish Yogurt Soup

What's So Great About the Recipe?

My favorite part about Yayla Corbasi is its simplicity. It takes just a few minutes of kitchen time to put this soup together.

And despite that simplicity, with its subtle, creamy flavors, it is a total delight for your taste buds, to say the least.

I also love the fact that I can bring in a lot of variations to the recipe too, based on what I have at hand, and my personal taste preference.

Ingredients For the Turkish Yogurt Soup

Greek yogurt: Thick, creamy yogurt is the base for this recipe. You can use regular yogurt or unflavored, unsweetened Greek yogurt- whatever you prefer.

Dried mint: Dried mint lends the soup a brilliant flavor and aroma that can actually lift your senses. You can easily make dried mint from fresh mint leaves.

Rice: I've used regular white rice. The rice helps bring some texture to the soup and makes it more filling too!

Egg yolk: Egg yolks bring a delicious creaminess and flavor to the soup, and also helps thicken it at the same time.

Chicken stock: Chicken stock adds a beautiful flavor to the soup, and also makes it more nutritious and healthy.

Flour: Flour is another essential part of this yoghurt soup - it acts as a thickener and makes the soup nice and creamy.

Butter: When teamed up with the dried mint, butter forms a nice, rich flavored concoction that you can drizzle over this Turkish soup.

See recipe card for quantities.

How to Make the Yayla Corbasi

To make this recipe, in a bowl, mix yogurt, egg yolk and flour and whisk it all together till you get a uniform mixture. Add salt to season.

Meanwhile, in a large pot, cook the rice for this recipe in the chicken stock, until it comes up to a boil and the rice is nice and soft.

Slowly add a little of the chicken stock that's leftover into the yogurt and mix well until the soups consistency starts to thicken.

Add the yogurt mixture back to the pot and let it simmer on medium heat. Once you bring to a boil, turn down the heat and ladle it out in small serving bowls.

Heat the butter in a small pan and add the dried mint, stirring occasionally. Quickly remove from heat and drizzle this over the yogurt soup, right before you serve.

You can also pour it over the yogurt and stir in the dried mint butter if you want those little specks of green in the white of the yogurt mixture.

Substitutions & Variations

To bring some more texture to the soup and make it more protein rich, you can add some pan-fried or oven roasted chickpeas to the soup.
In addition to the dried mint, you can also add some red pepper flakes to the soup to bring in a bit of heat and flavor.
A drizzle of homemade chili oil can be a great way to jazz up this soup.
You can also bring a bit of flavor variation to this Turkish yogurt soup recipe by adding some veggies of your choice into the mix. Carrots, celery, spinach and green onions are some good choices.

💭Top Tip

The egg and flour are both meant to be thickeners. You can adjust their quantity based on what you prefer.

Equipment

How to Store the Leftover Turkish Yogurt Soup

If you have any leftover Yayla Corbasi, you can refrigerate it for up to 2 days. Just remember to use a clean container, preferably one with an airtight lid.

Then, when you want to serve the soup again, you can reheat it in the microwave or over the stovetop in a saucepan on low heat until it starts to simmer.

Tips & Tricks to Nail the Recipe

The cooking time for the rice can vary based on the kind of rice you're using. Just make sure the rice is well cooked, but not overcooked and mushy.
Based on your personal preference, you can adjust the amount of rice you want for the soup. I would highly recommend sticking to the water and rice ratio I've mentioned to make this recipe- it really has the perfect balance of textures and flavors.
If you're adding some veggies into the soup, you may want to cook them with the rice
Remember to use full fat yogurt for this recipe. Choosing low fat yogurt will not give you the same creaminess and richness you're expecting.
I would recommend starting with ingredients at room temperature. If you use cold yogurt and cold egg yolk, there's a higher risk of the soup appearing grainy and curdled.
Remember to slowly add the rice water to the yogurt mixture little by little, stirring continuously. This will help keep the yogurt from curdling.
If you don find any lumps in the hot yogurt soup, you can whisk it nicely while it is still hot, and then top it with the minty butter.
You can actually make the mint sauce in advance and refrigerate it until you want to drizzle it over the soup. Plus, you can use it as a garnish to add flavor to your other foods too!
Be careful and keep the temperature low when you melt the butter - dried mint tends to burn easily.
If you have some leftover yogurt from this recipe that you want to put to use, you can make some Haydari too!

How to Serve the Yayla Corbasi

You can enjoy this creamy and filling soup on its own, or serve this Turkish yogurt soup with almost any Turkish food of your choice.

Here are a few good ideas to get you inspired.

With Kebabs

This comforting yogurt soup can be a great side dish to serve with any Turkish kebabs or grilled meats. It actually turns it into a complete meal.

To go the extra mile, you can also serve it with some authentic Turkish food like manti, cacik and some ayran.

With a Salad

If you're making the Yayla Corbasi as a part of a healthy meal, I would really recommend taking out a few extra minutes to whip up a nice salad to serve with the soup. You can try making some Fatoosh salad, which is super easy to make, and has those delicious Turkish flavors.

With Other Sides

You can also serve the Turkish yogurt soup with other sides and appetizers like Sumac onions, Acili Ezme (Turkish salsa), flatbreads, Zeytoon Parvardeh (olive salad), roasted bell peppers, Haydari (Turkish yogurt dip), cheese, pickles and small quantities of other foods.

FAQs

What Kind of Rice Should I Use?

You can use almost any kind of good quality rice for this recipe- even Basmati rice or Jasmine rice, if you really want that extra flavor.

What Can I Use Instead of Rice?

While the soup is traditionally made using rice, if you don't want to use rice, you can add some bulgur or quinoa too! The idea is to add some grains to the soup to make it more filling.

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