Passion-colored soup : Russian Borsch
日本語
It goes without saying that borsch is the most popular and well-known first course dish of the Russian Cuisine. They say it was named after an eatable plant borschevik Siberian which used to be cooked in soup in old Russia. There are a lot of borsch recipes nowadays: Russian borsch, Ukrainian borsch (with French bean), winter and summer variants of borsch etc. We are talking about some classical recipe of borsch.
On November, 2006 a famous soccer coach from Holland Mr. G. Hiddinks who gives training to Russian soccer team said in his interview to a Russian correspondent from “Sports Express”: “A person who first cooked borsch should have won Nobel Prize”.
In China city Shanghai there is a special Chinese word for Russian borsch. Two first hieroglyphs (kanji characters) mean “Russian” and the last one stands for “soup”. Almost every family in Shanghai can cook borsch which differs from classical Russian recipe by the taste of sesame oil.
The most important thing in cooking borsch is a broth. To make a tasty “rich” broth you should take a quality piece of fresh fatty meat or better a combination of two types of meat. The best choice is beef (veal) and pork. And, of course, at least one piece of the above should be with a bone. You can buy some meat at a supermarket. At present there is a big choice of different types of meat in every Food Department Store in Russia. The unbelievable fact only 15 years before! But a good cook prefers to buy beef and pork at the Meat Market (rynok) which is still very popular in Russia. They say the freshest meat is sold at the market and the prices are a little bit higher there.
When your best beef and pork are bought you pick out the biggest cooking pot of your kitchenware and do the following:
Ingredients（Serves 10）:
500 gr of meat with a bone (200 gr beef, 300 gr pork with a bone)
300 gr (1/3 of white cabbage head)
4-5 middle-size potatoes
2 fresh onions, 2-3 cloves of garlic
1 middle-size carrot
2 middle-size beetroots (200-250 gr)
2-3 tsps oil and ketchup or/and 1 fresh middle-size tomato
salt, pepper, parsley, dill, up to your taste
How to Cook:
1. Put the meat into the pot, pour about 3 liters of cold water. Start boiling over high heat, and then let the broth boil for about 45 minutes over low heat (To make about 2,5 liters of a good broth you should keep the pot covered while the broth is boiling over low heat). Add an onion while your broth is boiling. Don’t forget to add some salt and black pepper.
2. After the meat is cooked take it out. We’ll use it later. Take away cooked onion. Put into the boiling broth peeled potatoes cut into middle-sized cubes. (Cut each potato into 6-8 pieces.) 5-10 minutes later add cabbage, shredded or cut into squares.
3. While potato and cabbage are boiling in the broth, prepare the basic part of borsch. Chop a fresh onion into small pieces. A carrot and beetroot grate or cut into matchstick pieces. Pour some vegetable oil into a saucepan over medium heat, fry chopped onion till golden, and then add grated beetroot and carrot, ketchup and/or fresh cut tomatoes. Sprinkle grated beetroot with some vinegar or lemon juice to preserve bright color. Put the cover over the saucepan and let the vegetables stew for about 10 minutes till cooked. Add fresh chopped garlic. The so called zapravka is ready.
4. Put the basic part zapravka into the broth boiling with potato and cabbage, mix, add cooked meat (without bone) cut into walnut-size pieces, 3-5 bay leaves and let all boil for another 5 minutes. Add some extra salt if necessary.
5. Add chopped fresh parsley and dill. Borsch is served hot with a tablespoon of a sour cream per a plate. But Russian sour cream differs from that in Japan so it better use mayonnaise instead of.
Bon appetite!
