Russian cuisine
Borscht
A beetroot soup on beef stock where acid holds both the colour and the flavour. The beetroot is braised separately, never boiled in the pot.
- Prep
- 30 min
- Cook
- 120 min
- Total
- 150 min
- Difficulty
- Medium
Ingredients
- Beef on the bone700 g
- Beetroot — coarsely grated2
- Cabbage — shredded300 g
- Potatoes4
- Carrot1
- Onion1
- Tomato paste2 tbsp
- Vinegar, 9%1 tbsp
- Garlic3 clove
- Bay leaf2
- Sour creamto 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
Cover the meat with cold water, bring it to the boil and skim. Simmer for an hour and a half at a bare tremble — a rolling boil turns the stock cloudy.
90 min
- 2
Braise the beetroot in a pan with a spoon of oil, the tomato paste and the vinegar, covered, for about twenty minutes. The vinegar is what keeps the colour.
20 min
- 3
Separately fry the onion and carrot until soft and golden.
8 min
- 4
Lift the meat out, pull it into pieces and return it to the stock. Add the potatoes and give them ten minutes — before any acid reaches the pot.
10 min
- 5
Add the cabbage, then after five minutes the beetroot and the fried vegetables. Give it five minutes more, add the bay and garlic and take it straight off the heat.
12 min
- 6
Let it stand covered for at least twenty minutes. Serve with sour cream, which softens the acid and pulls the flavours together.
20 min
About the dish
The whole trick with borscht is acid. Beetroot loses its colour in an alkaline pot and turns brown, so boiling it in the soup gives you a brown pan by the end. Vinegar or lemon juice while the beetroot braises fixes the pigment and the soup stays ruby.
The second is the order things go in. Potato goes before the cabbage and before the sour dressing, because acid stops it softening: reverse them and the potato stays hard for good.
Worth knowing
- — Borscht is better on the second day: the flavours even out overnight and the beetroot finishes giving up its colour.
- — If the colour has gone anyway, stir in a spoon of fresh beetroot juice at the end and do not boil it after that.
Nutrition
Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.
- Calories
- 320 kcal
- Protein
- 18 g
- Fat
- 14 g
- Carbs
- 30 g