Barszcz (Polish Borscht)

Our Polish Borscht recipe (Barszcz) creates a beet soup that is chock full of veggies and boasts a bright, sweet and sour flavor making it a perfect first course or warming meal.

What Do You Do With Beets?

Make Borscht!

Don’t you just love the beautiful color beets give to everything they come in contact with?

Well, maybe not your fingers.

Then it’s a little disconcerting when the red just won’t come out.

But to everything else, beets bring such beautiful color!

Especially to a comforting bowl of beet soup!

The Many Faces Of Borscht

Borscht is a popular soup in many Eastern and Central European countries. And, while the soup’s ingredients (and spelling) vary by region, beets are the common thread throughout.

• Ukrainian borsch, which is thought to be the original, includes potatoes, mushrooms, cabbage, tomatoes, and a variety of beans.
• Russian borscht will commonly include cabbage and potatoes, as well as meat.
• The basic Polish barszcz includes onions, garlic, carrots, and celery.

Often for Polish barszcz, the soup is strained after cooking to produce a pure, red broth. This glassy broth is eaten with uszka, or mushroom-filled dumplings. It is this version of borscht that is commonly found on a traditional Polish Christmas Eve dinner tables.

But that’s not the version of borscht we’re talking about today.

Our Polish Barszcz Recipe

The most traditional recipes for Polish borscht start by fermenting beets and using the resulting sour fermenting liquid (much like the sour rye mixture use to make Polish white borscht).

This sour liquid, combined with the sweetness of cooked fresh beets and vegetables, gives the soup its characteristic sweet and sour flavor. 

Since most modern kitchens don’t tend to have beets fermenting on their counter, and fermenting beets adds a bit of time to the preparation process for this soup, many modern recipes will skip the fermented beet portion of the borscht recipe. Instead, they will either leave out the sour element to the soup or use some vinegar (and/or a sour cream garnish) to add the sour flavor in.

For our barszcz recipe, we are using apple cider vinegar to give the soup its characteristic sour flavor. And (as a bonus), it really nicely plays up the sweetness of the beets.

How To Make Beet Borscht

Borscht really is such a simple soup to make. Peeled and cubed beets are cooked with a variety of vegetables, giving of a beautiful color and wonderful aroma.

Some recipes will have you cook your beets first by either roasting or boiling, before peeling them and adding them to the soup.

We prefer to peel the raw beets and cook them right along with the rest of the veggies, in the traditional Polish fashion.

Not only do you skip a step, making this soup come together incredibly quickly, the raw beets add such a beautiful, deep color to the borscht.

And, since we like our soups hearty, we’ve left the veggies in our finished borscht.

How To Serve Polish Borscht

Since we like to keep our veggies in our beet soup, it’s hearty enough to serve as a main dish along with a good, fresh loaf of really crusty bread.

If you’d like to serve this soup as a first course or appetizer, smaller servings work great. Or, you can strain out the veggies and serve the clear borscht in a more traditional Polish fashion as a first course.

First course or main dish, a dollop of sour cream in your bowl adds a nice bright contrast and a creamy smoothness to round out the texture of this flavorful, brothy soup.

If you’ve never tried beet soup, you really must! It’s a winter staple in our house!

And, if you can’t get enough of those beets, try this chilled beet soup for warmer days!

 

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