Dovga (dovğa) is an Azerbaijani soup of sour yogurt cooked with rice and often chickpeas and a large amount of chopped fresh herbs – typically dill, coriander, mint, spinach and spring onion. It’s tangy, green and gently thick, eaten hot in winter and chilled, almost like a drink, in summer. The yogurt, called qatıq (katyk) in Azerbaijani, is the base and the main flavour, so dovga belongs on this site as a dish built on a ferment, even though the finished soup is cooked.
The Yogurt
Use plain, sour, full-fat yogurt – homemade if you can. Our yogurt guide sets it warm from pasteurized milk; traditional Caucasian sour milks such as Georgian matsoni are dominated by the thermophilic yogurt bacteria Streptococcus thermophilus and Lactobacillus delbrueckii subsp. bulgaricus (Quero et al., 2014). Village yogurts are sometimes made from raw milk, which can carry harmful germs (CDC); start from pasteurized milk at home. Since the soup is cooked, a little extra sourness – a day-old yogurt, or a squeeze of lemon – is welcome.
Why Dovga Curdles, and How to Stop It
Yogurt is acidic, and acid plus heat makes milk proteins clump, so yogurt poured straight into a boiling pot splits into curds and whey. Dovga cooks get round this in three ways: they whisk a beaten egg (or a spoonful of flour, or both) into the cold yogurt first, they bring the mixture up to a simmer slowly over moderate heat, and they stir constantly, traditionally in one direction, until it thickens. Once it has come to a gentle simmer smoothly, the herbs go in for a few minutes at the end so they stay green.
No Live Cultures – and That’s Fine
Cooking kills the yogurt’s bacteria, and chilling the soup afterwards doesn’t bring them back. Dovga is made from a fermented food but contains no live cultures, like sourdough bread; the ISAPP expert panel’s definition of fermented foods makes the same distinction between foods made by microbes and foods that still contain them (Marco et al., 2021). Enjoy dovga for its flavour and its herbs, and eat yogurt fresh if you want the live bacteria – for example as labneh.
Serving and Keeping
Serve dovga hot, or cool it and serve it cold the next day, thinned with a little water because it thickens in the fridge. It’s a cooked soup with egg and dairy, so treat it like any leftover: refrigerate within two hours of cooking and eat within three to four days (USDA FSIS). Relatives include Armenian spas, a yogurt soup with wheat berries and herbs, and Turkish tarhana, a dried yogurt and grain ferment cooked into soup.