Żurek

Ingredients

• Rye starter — bought or home-made400 ml
• White sausage500 g
• Smoked bacon100 g
• Onion1
• Garlic4 clove
• Dried marjoram2 tsp
• Vegetable or meat stock1 l
• Single cream100 ml
• Eggs — hard-boiled4
• Horseradishto taste
• Salt and pepperto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Render the bacon in a pot, soften the onion in it, add the garlic and marjoram and warm them for half a minute.

   10 min

2. 2

   Pour in the stock, lower the sausage in whole and simmer for thirty minutes. Do not pierce it, or its juices leave too early.

   30 min

3. 3

   Lift the sausage out, slice it and return it to the pot. Shake the starter in its jar and pour it in, stirring.

   5 min

4. 4

   Warm it for five minutes without letting it boil hard, stir in the cream and taste. If it is not sour enough, add more starter; salt at the end.

   6 min

5. 5

   Ladle into bowls, add half a boiled egg each and serve with horseradish. In Poland żurek often comes in a hollowed loaf.

About the dish

The sourness of żurek is the zakwas: rye flour with water and garlic, left five days at room temperature. Vinegar will not stand in for it — fermentation tastes softer and deeper, with none of the sharpness.

The starter goes in at the very end and is not boiled for long. Extended boiling costs it both acid and aroma, and clouds the soup.

The white sausage, biała kiełbasa, is raw and unsmoked. It poaches in the broth and gives up its marjoram and garlic; a smoked sausage makes a different soup entirely.

Worth knowing

• — Home-made starter: four spoons of rye flour, two cups of warm boiled water, three cloves of garlic and a crust of rye bread. Five days in the warm under a cloth.
• — Shake the starter before it goes in: all the flour settles at the bottom, and without shaking only water reaches the pot.
• — Marjoram is not interchangeable with oregano here, related though they are. Without marjoram żurek stops being żurek.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

540 kcal

Protein

26 g

Fat

38 g

Carbs

22 g

More from Poland

• Pierogi ruskie — Dumplings of potato and curd cheese, served with fried onion and soured cream.