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Every year, when the weather starts getting hot here in Bulgaria, tarator is my rescue from the heat. Tarator is fast to prepare, it is low in calorie, and it is very delicious.

Tarator is a cold soup, which means that it is served cold. What is more, tarator is prepared without boiling, so if the idea to turn the cooker on when the temperature is 30-35 degrees C makes you sweat, don’t worry. Unlike almost any other soup, tarator doesn’t require boiling, so there is no reason why you must turn the cooker on and sweat around it.

Ingredients

• 1-2 cucumbers (could be a kilogram or more of them)
• 200-300 grams of yoghurt (low fat yoghurt is also OK)
• 100-150 ml of water
• Garlic
• Salt
• Vinegar

The dosage above is enough for 3-4 cups but once you try tarator, you will see that 3-4 cups is not enough when you are thirsty, so you can get 2-3 times of each ingredient and still this will not make too much tarator you won’t be able to eat. Tarator is light food and you can eat lots of it without worries you will gain weight.

Method

Here are the steps to follow in order to prepare tarator:

1. Wash the cucumbers and peel them.
2. Use a grater to grate them into small pieces. Alternatively, you can use a knife and cut them into small pieces but this takes more time and the pieces are larger. But if you don’t have a grater or any other appliance to cut/chop the cucumber into small pieces, cutting them with a knife is OK.
3. Add some chopped garlic, salt and vinegar to the grated cucumbers and mix well. Alternatively, you can use lemon juice instead of vinegar.
4. Stir the yoghurt and pour it into the cucumber mixture.
5. Add the water and put the tarator into the fridge for half an hour and that’s it.

This is the simplest tarator recipe and I like it most. There are variations of the recipe – for instance you can add dill as well and/or chopped nuts but since I am not fond of dill and I can do without nuts, I usually skip them. You can also add some sunflower/olive oil but since this adds calories without improving the taste (in my opinion, of course), you can skip this step as well.

The only thing left to do is to get a spoon and start eating. Bon appetit! Summer heat is so different when there is cold summer soup to cool with!