Ukrainian borscht
Ukrainian borscht with roasted beets, cabbage and slow-simmered beef shank. Most of the depth comes from roasting the beets rather than boiling them.
- 220
- kcal
- 14g
- protein
- 8g
- fat
- 24g
- carbs
- Prep
- 25 min
- Cook
- 2 h 45 min
- Serves
- 6
Ingredients
- 3 medium beets, scrubbed
- 1 lb bone-in beef shank and 10 cups water, or 8 to 10 cups vegetable stock
- 1/2 head green cabbage, shredded
- 2 carrots, grated
- 2 potatoes, cubed
- 1 onion, diced
- 2 tbsp tomato paste
- 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
- 2 bay leaves
- 1 tbsp sunflower or olive oil
- Salt and black pepper
- Sour cream and dill, to serve
Method
-
1
Roast the beets
Wrap the beets in foil and roast at 400°F for 50 minutes, until a knife goes in without resistance. Cool, peel and grate.
-
2
Make the beef stock
Meanwhile simmer the beef in 10 cups of water with the bay leaves for 2 to 2 1/2 hours, until the meat falls from the bone, skimming the foam in the first ten minutes. Lift the meat out, shred it, and keep the stock.
-
3
Cook the soup base
Soften the onion and carrot in the oil, add the tomato paste and cook for two minutes until it darkens.
-
4
Add the potatoes and cabbage
Add the potatoes to the stock and boil for 8 minutes, then add the cabbage and the onion mixture. Simmer 10 minutes.
-
5
Add the beets and vinegar
Add the grated beets, the shredded meat and the vinegar. Adding the beets late is what keeps the color; the vinegar helps them hold it.
-
6
Rest and serve
Season with salt and pepper, take off the heat and leave 20 minutes before serving. Sour cream and dill at the table.
Why roasting the beets matters
Boiling beets, especially peeled or cut ones, leaches some of their sugar and color into water you then throw away. Roasting concentrates both. It is the single change that separates a borscht that tastes of earth and sweetness from one that tastes faintly of nothing, and it costs you fifty unattended minutes in the oven while the stock simmers anyway.
The second color rule is timing, and it is chemistry rather than tradition. Betanin, the pigment in beets, breaks down with long heat, and holds up better in acid than in neutral liquid. Add the beets near the end, with the vinegar, and the soup stays deep red; simmer them from the start and you get a brownish stew that tastes fine and looks wrong.
Making it vegetarian
Swap the beef shank and water for 8 to 10 cups of a well-made vegetable stock and add a tablespoon of smoked paprika with the tomato paste. The smoke does some of the work the bone was doing. A can of white beans added with the cabbage brings the protein back up to about 7 g a serving. Potato and cheese pierogi on the side make it a full meal either way, or, if you are not keeping it vegetarian, a plate of meat-filled pelmeni.
Sour cream, and what it costs
A tablespoon of full-fat sour cream adds roughly 25 kcal and 2.5 g of fat. It is worth it: the fat carries flavor compounds the broth alone cannot, and the acidity plays against the sweetness of the beets. Greek yogurt does the same job for fewer calories and a sharper finish, though it will split if stirred into soup that is still boiling.
Cold borscht
This borscht is a hot soup. Chilled, the beef fat sets and the cabbage and potatoes taste heavy. The soup most people mean by cold borscht is a different dish, made for summer. In Ukraine it is called kholodnyk, in Poland chłodnik, and in Lithuania šaltibarščiai, a bright pink soup that is now a national summer dish there. It has no meat, cabbage or long cooking. Cooked beets, and often young beet greens, go into a cold base of kefir or soured milk with diced cucumber, radishes, green onions, dill and chopped hard-boiled egg. The Lithuanian version is served with hot boiled potatoes on the side.
To make a simple one, cook and grate 3 beets, or use the extra roasted beets if you made them for this recipe. Mix them with 4 cups of cold plain kefir or buttermilk, a cucumber and a few radishes, diced, two sliced green onions, a handful of dill, and lemon juice and salt to taste. Chill it well and serve with a halved egg in each bowl.
Keeping it
Borscht is better on the second day and better again on the third. The flavors are still combining while it sits. It keeps up to 4 days refrigerated and freezes well, though the potatoes turn slightly grainy on thawing. If you plan to freeze it, leave them out and add freshly boiled potato when you reheat.
What it is worth nutritionally
At 220 kcal and 14 g of protein a serving this is a genuinely filling main course, and the cabbage and beets between them supply a substantial amount of fiber. Beets are also one of the better dietary sources of nitrate, which the body converts to nitric oxide. That is the mechanism behind the modest blood pressure effects seen in beet juice trials. A bowl of soup is not a clinical dose, but it is not nothing either. Roast an extra beet or two while the oven is on and you have the start of a roasted beet salad.
