Summer Borscht

if it’s cold, is it even soup?

things you’ll need: beets, water, lemon, sugar, salt and pepper. garnish options: boiled potatoes, cucumber, radish, dill, hard-boiled egg, green onion, and sour cream

incidentally gluten-free and vegetarian, vegan without the sour cream or sub vegan sour cream.

mostly drawn from this recipe and story from Sasha Shor on The Jewish Food Society

if you are looking for other beet soups, check out the other two posts for a super delicious hot beet soup and this super tangy buttermilk beet soup with pickles.

if you are generally into beets, there are several salads and snack beets in the archives

Chapter 163

Either you are into beets or you are not. Just like some people are hot weather people and other people are not insane sun worshipers and do not enjoy dripping with sweat while burning alive. To each their own.

As a devout temperate climate person, you love a good soup. As soon as the temperature dips under 70 degrees, you pull out your trusty soup pot and it remains on the stove for the next eight months. Like a weird culinary carrion scavenger, you collect the bones and shells from other meals to stash away for various stock makings and future soup.

And though you pine for long nights and cozy sweaters, cuddled around a warm bowl of steaming soup, it is still very hot outside and you caught yourself leaning into the open freezer and moaning a bit with pleasure. Not soup weather.

Enter: The Summer Soup.

You have always given cold soup the side-eye. Is that a soup or is that just a smoothie in a bowl? Not that you’re judging but if you wanted to eat a bowl of runny salsa, you would. But because you are very much a beet person and your love of beets supersedes all other prejudices, Borscht remains a beloved summer extravagance.

When you used to go places and eat indoors, you sought diners and delis that delivered baskets of bialys and challah slices to the table along with a mix of kosher dill pickles and half sours, because one pickle spear served alongside a sandwich is just a tease. As soon as the hot weather hit, you’d always ask if they had Borscht because that’s when you eat Borscht. It wasn’t always on the menu, but you knew to ask.

You haven’t sat in one of those booths, choosing between blintzes or pastrami, in a very long time, but that doesn’t stop you from getting what you want. You’ve learned many things as a result of this pandemic. The more pleasurable lessons include finding out that German Pancakes and Popovers are almost the same things and neither is very hard. Also, you CAN actually bake, beans are delicious, and burrata is really good with peaches. Most importantly, the simplest things are often your favorite things and this borscht is no exception. Ready?

Peel and quarter about 6-8 medium-sized beets. Cover in 8-12 cups of water. Everything in your pot at the moment will become borscht, so fix your proportions to your liking. Remember, the recipes with the most variations are the ones that are fairly unfuckupable. If you are feeling a bit less than traditional and imagine that having more than one vegetable may have been a luxury when this recipe was originally developed, maybe throw some onion or carrot into the water too.

Bring the pot to a boil, put a lid on it, and simmer until the beets are tender. Remove the stock from the stove (fish out any non-beet vegetables you may have added). Pull out the food processor or box grater. If using the box grater, remove the beets from the water and let them cool. You may want to find a pair of gloves and possibly a drop cloth because it’s gonna get messy. Using whichever kitchen tool, shred those beets. You could get fancy, cut your beets into tiny cubes, and call it modern. Do what you want.

The shredded beets go back in the beet water, along with a lemon’s worth of juice (because why only use part of a lemon?), 2 or more Tablespoons of sugar (depending on how sweet you like it), and then salt and pepper to taste.

The hardest part is letting it sit in the refrigerator overnight.

Top with other fresh-tasting chopped summer things if you want. Add a hardboiled egg for protein. Do not skip the sour cream and dill.

Make yourself a pickle plate, grab yourself a Dr. Brown’s, and add this little pleasure to the list of upsides.

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