Dinner Jun 28, 2023
Note: I had a small stockpile of hearty veggies that have been in my fridge for a few months, and really should be used soon. They were mostly the ingredients for Ukrainian borscht, but because I made it to be served cold, maybe it's more of a holodnik?
Day 1 (Evening)
Ingredients:
Stock (maybe 4 cups)
1½ pounds Roasted Beets
1 Carrot 1 Parsnip 1 Onion
½ small head Green Cabbage 1 can Whole Peeled Tomatoes (28oz)
⅓ pound dried White Navy Beans
To Taste:
Kosher Salt
Black Pepper
Red Wine Vinegar
Smoked Paprika
Fresh Dill
Directions:
Make easy stock from one bag of scraps, (or add ~4 cups of stock to a large pot) heat to a boil
While stock heats, peel and dice carrot, parsnip, and onion
When stock is boiling, add carrot, parsnip, onion, and the can of tomatoes, crushing the tomatoes by hand
[Poke a hole in the tomato with a finger, then squeeze it in your hand into a fist. The hole keeps the juices from going everywhere]
While those cook, shred cabbage
Once beets are cooled, dice
Add the cabbage, beets, and the beet juice left in the foil to the pot
Season with salt, pepper, red wine vinegar, and paprika
[Go easy for now, it'll taste different once it's cold]
Once all vegetables are tender, remove from heat
While the soup is cooling, remove the fronts from a few sprigs of dill [think I did five], save the fronds and add the stems to the soup
[Adds dill flavor without wilting the dill fronds (is that really possible or a problem with dill though? Probably not, but it worked well, so keep in mind for future use.)]
Add beans to a bowl, salt liberally, and add enough water for it to go a few inches over the top of the beans
Let beans soak overnight
Once cooled, put soup in fridge overnight
[Cooling before putting in the fridge keeps your fridge's temperature from rising and then possibly spoiling other food faster]
Day 2 (Late Afternoon)
To Taste:
Iodized salt
MSG (optional)
Black Pepper
Red Wine Vinegar
Fresh Dill
Directions:
Drain and rinse the beans
Add beans to a pot, pour enough water to go two inches over the beans, season with salt and MSG
Cook on low for about 30 minutes, or until the beans are cooked through, but not yet creamy [add more water as needed, but I only did about an inch of water]
While beans cook, discard the dill stems
Roughly chop the dill fronts set aside yesterday and add to soup
Taste test and add any needed additional seasoning [I went heavy on the red wine vinegar and pepper and didn't add any salt] but still be careful since beans will be added
Once beans are cooked to the point where they still have some bite to them, add them to yesterday's soup, including the bean's cooking liquid if the soup needs to be thinned
Put back in fridge to cool
Serve with a dollop of labna yogurt (or sour cream) and more fresh dill, and maybe a hard boiled egg if you're going the holodnik route
About the recipe, from Daniel Gritzer's Borscht Recipe:
Raw Beets vs Roasted Beets
A lot of recipes have you roast the beets before adding them, which I did early on in my testing; they take a while to cook, so it seemed like a good time-saver to roast them while the broth is simmering. But then a friend asked me why I didn't just cut them up raw and add them to the pot with everything else, and I realized that not only did I not have a good answer, but it seemed like a worthy variable to test.
So I made a subsequent batch in which I peeled the raw beets, cut them up, and added them to the pot with everything else, and I was quickly won over by the results. First, when diced, they cook through as rapidly as all the other vegetables, so the time saved through roasting first wasn't relevant—in retrospect, it's extremely obvious that small cubes of beets will cook much faster than large whole ones. More importantly, the final soup made with un-roasted beets tasted, well, beetier, and had a much deeper purple color—clearly, you lose valuable beet juices and flavor with that initial roasting step.
I love beets and wanted a very beet-forward soup, so using raw beets immediately became my preferred method. If you're not the biggest fan of beets, though, this may be a reason to opt for roasting them first.
[I, on the other hand, wanted less beetiness for a summer soup. So I opted for roasted.]
Final Notes:
It was really interesting to watch the soup change color. First it was brownish from yellowy stock and tomatoes, then it got kinda redder after the beets and their juices got added, worked it's was to tomato sauce red (like it looked like the can of tomatoes when I opened it), and then to the kinda purply/pinky color you think Ukrainian borscht should be.
I do not claim to be knowledgeable in Eastern European cuisine, I'm only just learning.
Holodnik is a cold beet soup, but seems to have different ingredients than this soup, like a yogurt or kefir base, cucumber, and topped with an egg. This uses more Ukrainian borscht ingredients. So I feel like it's best to just call it cold beet soup. So glamorous, right? I should try making a real holodnik some day.
My cooled soup was so gelatinous when I pulled it out to finish it the second day, it reminded me of cranberry chutney when stirring it! Mine needed the bean's cooking liquid to help thin it out. And then the left-overs the following days needed some water too.
If made with vegetable stock (mine was chicken stock), this could easily be a vegan recipe!
(left) served "borscht stye" with a labna dollop and dill
(right) served "holodnik style" with labna mixed in and topped with a hard boiled egg and dill
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