Passport & Plate - Authentic Ukrainian borsch
Ukraine | Tuesday, March 11, 2014 | 2 photos
Ingredients
Ingredients (for 2-2,5 l of soup)
500 g bone-in pork
1 medium-sized beetroot
10 g margarine
1 carrot
1 onion
200 g tomato paste
½ cabbage
½ sweet pepper
300 g potatoes
For serving:
parsley
green onion
sour cream (smetana, crème fraiche)
How to prepare this recipe1. Start by preparing the meat broth. Wash the pork and place it in a pot filled with cold water. Simmer on medium heat for 1-1,5 hours. To get a rich broth, it is strongly recommended to use pork on a bone.
2. After the broth has simmered long enough, add julienned (=cut into long thin strips) beetroot to the boiling broth. It is important to cut it as thinly as possible, without resorting to grating. Simmer until the beetroot becomes almost transparent.
3. Chop the onion, and dice the potatoes (not too small). Once the beetroot is ready, add the potatoes and half of the onion. Continue to simmer.
4. Peel and coarsely grate the carrot. Then preheat a frying pan, put some margarine on it and add the grated carrot along with the remaining half of the chopped onion. Fry until slightly golden in color. Next, stir in the tomato paste and boil for about 5 minutes.
5. Slice ½ cabbage as thinly as possible. Cut the sweet pepper in strips as well.
6. Once the potatoes are cooked through, add shredded cabbage, sliced pepper and tomato paste mix into the boiling borsch. Bring to a boil on medium heat, and then remove from heat to avoid overcooking the cabbage. You want it to remain a bit crispy.
7. Garnish with chopped parsley and green onions, serve with smetana (sour cream) and garlic buns.
Borsch is considered to become even better after having infused for a while.
The story behind this recipeBorsch. It looks like an entirely obvious choice of recipe for a person of Eastern European origin like myself. Often labelled as a ‘Russian dish’, borsch is actually a part of Ukrainian culinary practice. Whenever there is talk of the traditional foods of my country, this soup is one of the first dishes to be mentioned. Moreover, it is one of the main symbols of Ukraine and a hallmark of its cuisine. It is borsch which is considered a ‘must-have’ for the repertoire of every decent Ukrainian housewife and mother, and it is borsch that you will treat your foreign friends with in order to present your country. Even so, the reason borsch is so special to me has little to do with all of that. For me, borsch is more than just a soup. The recipe I share with you today was passed down for four generations from my great-grandmother, ultimately reaching me, and has long ago become a family heirloom of sorts.
Imagine a tiny Soviet apartment filled with a familiar smell that pervades your senses as soon as you step over the threshold. One might describe it as a symphony of smells composed of a variety of vegetables and accentuated with fresh meat. However, the charming aroma aside, as the saying goes: the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so it is time to gather all the family around the dining table, armed with their spoons and appetite. Borsch offers a diapason of tastes to sample. There is the light sourness of tomatoes as well as of smetana – the essential companion of borsch. There is the rich flavor of meat bouillon, complemented by the more subtle undertones of vegetables – thinly sliced cabbage, potatoes and even paprika. For a while, the only sound one can hear is the plinking of spoons, but as soon as everyone’s got a bit of a taste, the family bursts out chatting.
These are the memories this dish evokes in me. No matter how far I am from Ukraine these days, borsch always smells and tastes like home.