Vegetarian Borscht
Borscht is a soup that was a staple of Russian and Ukrainian peasants. This soup uses ingredients that are easily grown in your vegetable patch. We are making this using the last of our home grown beetroot and cabbage.The other great thing about this soup is that you can vary the ingredients based on what is in season or cheaply available locally.
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Ingredients
- 12 ounces uncooked beetroot peel slice and cut into thin strips
- 1 tbsp vegetable oil
- 1 large red onion thinly sliced
- 1 large carrot julienne strips
- 3 celery stalks thinly diced
- 6¼ cups vegetable stock
- 8 oz tomatoes
- 2 tbsps lemon juice
- Salt & pepper to taste
- 2 tbsps fresh dill If you don't have fresh substitute with dried dill. Alternatively top with fresh parsley.
- 4 oz white cabbage
- 1/2 cup sour cream
Instructions
- Peel, dice, slice, and prepare vegetables as desired. When we originally made this recipe, we spent a long time precisely cutting vegetables, but remember, this was peasant fayre, so rough and ready is perfectly OK. We now often grate vegetables, and this cooks quicker.
- Heat the oil in a heavy-based pan. Saute the onion for 2 to 3 minutes, and then add the carrot, celery, and beetroot. Cook for a further 4 or 5 minutes until thevegetables begin to soften and oil is absorbed. If you've grated the vegetables this will be a much quicker process.
- Add the stock, tomatoes, lemon juice, half the dill, and seasoning. Bring to a boil and cook for around 30 minutes (longer if the vegetables are chunkier) until the vegetables are tender.
- If you plan on keeping this in the fridge for a couple of days or freezing now's the time to save the soup in a suitable container.
- Now add the cabbage and simmer until cooked. Probably, only about 5 minutes. Add any extra seasoning and service topped with fresh dill and sour cream.
- This, like most soups, just gets better if you add some nice crusty fresh bread.
Notes
This makes an excellent warming Winter lunch. Remember that the soup’s origin is food for poor peasants rather than the rich, so it would have been a case of using whatever they had in their vegetable garden. This makes it a perfect recipe for locally sourced ingredients. We regularly grow everything for this recipe except salt, pepper, and sour cream in our garden.
Feel free to substitute or add other vegetables based on what’s available. Potatoes, swede (rutabagas), turnips, parsnips, or sweet potatoes are all good options..