Traditional Polish red borscht

Red borscht is absolutely my favourite Christmas dish. I could eat this soup and dumplings all holidays and don’t even look at other dishes. Of course the best borscht is the one my grandma is cooking. I’m wainting whole year to taste this delicious, amazing seasoned stock made of beets.
This year I’m planning to follow every step of my grandma’s cooking, so I can learn her tricks. But meanwhile I decided to cook the red borscht on my own. I choose traditional recipe from old Polish cookbook. To make this borscht you need to prepare sourdough first. You can read about it here.
Sadly my garndma lives to far and she couldn’t taste my borscht, but I think it was quite good and everyone likes it.

Ingredients:
for about 3 liters

20g dried mushrooms
500g soup vegetables*
2 bay leaves
allspice
1 cup water from soaking mushrooms
3 ½ liter water
1kg beets
1200-1600ml beet sourdough**
2 cloves garlic (optional)
salt
sugar
pepper

* use mixted veggies like: carrots, celery root, parsley root, leek, cabbage, onion etc
** in the traditional recipe there is only 1 liter of sourdough, but for me it taste beetter when you add more, s adjust to your taste

1. First you need to cook vegetable stock. You need to wash and peel veggies. Prepare the onion on the dry frying pan. Fry the halves or quaters of onion until is burnt and aromatic.

2. Soak the mushroom in the hot water.

3. Pour 3 ½ liter of water into large pot, add water from soaking the mushrooms, vegetables, onion. Add all spice and bay leaves. Bring to a boil and cook on the low heat for about an hour.

4. Meanwhile prepare the beets. You can roast them or cook them. No matter what you choose, wash them, but don’t peel, cut etc. I chose baking, so I placed beets in the oven (200c) and bake the for about 1 hour (time of baking depeneds on size of beets). When they ready peel them and shred (or just cut into small pieces).

5. Strain off the vegetable stock. Add beets to the clear liqiud and bring to a boil. Turn the heat of. Strain again to remove beets.

6. Add sourdough in amount you like, season with minced garlic (optional), salt, sugar and pepper.

When you want to heat the borscht don;t bring it to aboil, because this will affect the color of the borscht.

Serve with:
– dumplings
– white beans
-buckwheat groats
– fried onions (this may add a little fat to you borscht, so you can see th drops floating on your soup like on the pics)

Enjoy!

Tags: beets borscht Christmas dinner red borsch sourdough