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Avgolemono Soup and Grilled Chicken and Mango Salad

Avgolemono is a Greek soup made with egg and lemon juice mixed with broth, heated until they thicken but before they boil and curdle. Avgolémono translates to "egg-lemon," in English.

It is also part of certain stew-like dishes such as the Greek pork with celery and the Turkish yuvarlak, added just before serving to thicken the cooking juices. In other Middle Eastern cuisines, it is used as a sauce for chicken or fish.

As a soup, it usually starts with chicken broth (though meat, fish, or vegetable broths may sometimes be used). Typically, rice or soup pasta, such as orzo, are cooked in the broth with thin strips of meat (chicken, for example) before a mixture of eggs and lemon is added. Its consistency varies from near-stew to near-broth. It is important to remove the mixture from the heat before adding the egg-lemon mix, in order to avoid curdling. The safest way to prevent curdling is to remove a cup of broth from the pot and let cool a little, then gradually add the egg and lemon juice while beating the mixture vigorously with a fork or whisk; once the broth is frothy, it is gently added back to the pot and the soup is served immediately. Leftover soup will invariably curdle, even if refrigerated or rewarmed. Its taste will not change but the texture and mouthfeel cannot be recovered.

The soup is usually made with whole eggs; sometimes with just yolks.^[1] The whites typically are beaten first until soft peaks form and then the yolks and lemon juice are beaten into the whites until just combined. Whole eggs may also be beaten together without the initial separation. Starch may be added to the soup as an additional thickener, however, it is most often used if one omits the egg whites from the recipe, as the volume from the whipped whites create thickness.