Borscht from Ukraine is my 28th meal our of 30 from 30 different countries. Borscht is a vegetable based soup (although sometimes it’s made with meat) that gets its beautiful colour from beets. It’s not just a beet soup however, there's onions. Carrots, potatoes and cabbage in this version of borscht as well.
This meal is also pretty special to me because my late grandmother made it for me, not very often but it was great when she did. The recipe I used can be found here, however to make this borscht more like my grandmother’s, I probably added 3x the pepper than what the recipe called for as that was the one characteristic I remember from my grandmother's borscht, or most of her soups for that matter: lots of pepper.
Making this, as you can see in the recipe, was fairly easy, bring stock to a boil and add in cabbage and potatoes, sautée the onions, carrots and beets then add them in and stew. Season with salt, pepper (!!), sugar and vinegar and let stew for 10 minutes. Add fresh dill immediately before serving with a nice dollop of sour cream.
If you do all this you get a hearty, warm soup with a slight sourness from the vinegar and sour cream. All the vegetables were tender and flavourful. I was actually quite impressed with the potatoes as I find a lot of potatoes in soups taste under-seasoned but these were great!
This was a really enjoyable meal for me to make because it gave me a chance to reminisce about my grandmother and share something with her. The borscht turned out great, lots of pepper just as she would’ve liked. 28 meals down, 2 more to go. As always the updated map and extra pictures can be found below. Thanks for reading, see you again next time.
Cheers,
Brandon
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