You need to know how to properly cook borscht with beets in order to get the result delicious dish with a rich red color. And for this it is worth fulfilling several necessary nuances.

How to cook borscht with beets: learning to preserve color

Ingredients

Vegetable oil 2 tbsp. Lemon juice 1 tsp Tomato paste 1 tbsp. Garlic 2 cloves Onion 2 pieces) Carrot 2 pieces) Beet 2 pieces) White cabbage 500 grams Potato 5 piece(s) meat 800 grams

  • Number of servings: 6
  • Cooking time: 3 minutes

How to deliciously cook borscht with beets: a classic recipe

Delicious borscht is prepared with rich meat broth. Beef is often used for this, but you can use other types of meat - choose according to your taste. It is better to use meat on the bone - the broth will be richer.

Cut the meat into medium-sized pieces, add water and cook over low heat for about 2-2.5 hours. It is in the cooking time that the secret of the broth’s taste is hidden, so you should not remove it from the heat before the specified time.

At this time, prepare the beets. You can boil it, bake it or stew it.

To cook beets, cover them with water, add lemon juice and cook until soft. But it will be faster to stew it: coarsely grate the beets, mix them with lemon juice and simmer under the lid (after frying a little) until tender.

Chop the onion and carrots, mix with tomato paste, add salt and fry in oil until tender. Shred the cabbage.

When the broth is almost ready, cut the potatoes into cubes and place them in the pan. Let it cook for 10 minutes, then add the roast into the broth, and after another 10, cabbage and beets and boil them for 3-4 minutes. Shortly before turning off the heat, add chopped garlic to the borscht. At the end, sprinkle the dish with herbs and let it sit for about 30 minutes. Serve with sour cream.

How to cook borscht with beets: other options

Changing the composition a little classic recipe, you can get completely different tastes of this dish. It is prepared, for example:

  • with sauerkraut and pickled beets - this dish has a pleasant sourness. Before adding the cabbage, you need to simmer it for 5 minutes with sugar;
  • without cabbage on pork ribs - a unique version of rich beetroot soup.

There is also a lean version - instead of meat they use mushrooms, boiling them for 20-30 minutes to obtain a broth.

If you want to get a more dietary meat broth, then cook it on chicken breast. It will be less caloric. If you need a richer borscht, then choose pieces of meat with fat.

The world-famous dish, Ukrainian borscht, must have a rich taste, aroma and bright red color. If you are looking for an answer to the question of how to cook borscht with beets so that it is red, step by step recipe with clear recommendations “from first hand” will help you easily cope with the task. We guarantee: if you do everything as written, the borscht will turn out as red as you dreamed of. Looking ahead, I’ll tell you that the brightness of color can be achieved using the natural colors of selected vegetables - beets, tomatoes, peppers, as well as thanks to special techniques in the technology of preparing borscht dressing, when, when sautéing fresh grated beets, vinegar or lemon juice is added, which enhance and fix the color.

Ingredients:

  • Water - 5 l;
  • Pork ribs with brisket - 1 kg;
  • Potatoes - 1 kg;
  • Beets - 3 pcs.;
  • Carrots - 3 pcs.;
  • Onions - 2 pcs.;
  • White cabbage - 1/2 pcs.;
  • Tomato juice - 1.5 l;
  • Vegetable oil - 150 ml;
  • Natural vinegar - 50 ml;
  • Sugar - 1 tbsp. l.;
  • Dried dill - 1 tbsp. l.;
  • Bay leaf - 5 pcs.;
  • Hot red pepper - 1 pc.;
  • Pepper mixture - 1 tsp;
  • Salt - to taste.

Cooking time: 1.5 hours

Number of servings: 12 pcs.


Step-by-step recipe for making red borscht with photos

Pour in the washed meat cold water and set the broth to cook, from which we will periodically remove the foam.


Cut the peeled potatoes into medium-sized pieces and add them to the prepared boiling broth.


Finely chop the onion.


Using a large grater, grate the carrots and beets.


Sauté the onion in hot refined oil until transparent.


Add grated carrots to the sauté.


Now it’s the turn of the grated beets to be in the borscht dressing, which should be sautéed with frequent stirring.


Immediately add any light natural vinegar - we have apple-josht vinegar. This will help preserve the color of the beets, make the borscht red and give it the necessary sourness.


Adding a small amount of sugar will enhance the flavor of the rest of the borscht.


Pour tomato juice or fruit juice into the borscht dressing. You can replace these products with fresh tomatoes, tomato puree or tomato paste.


Shred the cabbage and add it to the pot of boiling broth when the potatoes are half done or almost done (depending on your preference for the final taste and texture of the potatoes and cabbage).


Add hot pepper to the dressing and Bay leaf.


Let's season our borscht with aromatic dried dill.


Grind the pepper mixture in a mortar. You can get by with black or white peppercorns if you don’t have a mixture. Add chopped pepper to the borscht.


Add the borscht dressing to the pan with the rest of the ingredients, stir and let simmer for another 5-7 minutes.


Our Ukrainian borscht is ready. Its color turned out, as always, rich and red. The borscht should sit a little before serving and reach the required temperature.


Serve the borscht hot, pouring it into large serving bowls. An excellent addition is garlic donuts. Optional: filling with thick sour cream. Serve it separately so everyone can add extra sour cream to their plate. Garnish the borscht with thin pieces of salted lard, garlic, and onion. This is delicious! Have a pleasant gastronomic experience!


Borscht is a wonderful, wonderful and everyone’s favorite dish. You can find many variations of recipes for preparing borscht. Ukraine is considered the birthplace of borscht, but many peoples of the world call this dish their national dish. Each nation prepares borscht differently, there is no specific recipe, each has its own “zest” that distinguishes the borscht of each nation, making it special. How to cook delicious classic borscht with beets?

How to cook borscht?

1. Prepare broth with meat.

2. Stew the beets separately.

3 . Make a dressing for borscht.

4. Chop the vegetables, add to the broth and cook.

5. Add spices.

Cooking features

Bouillon. Borscht must be rich, and therefore First, prepare the broth. To prepare it, you should buy beef and pork breast, which are taken in a ratio of 2 to 1. Do not forget that borscht can be prepared in other broths and without adding meat, but then it will have a different taste. For example, to prepare Poltava or Odessa borscht, use duck or goose broth, and when preparing Kyiv borscht, you need to cook the broth with beef and lamb.

Beet. Beets are stewed separately from other vegetables, and to preserve their color, you need to sprinkle the vegetable with freshly squeezed lemon juice or vinegar. Before you start stewing the beets, you need to cut them into strips or small cubes. Frying beets should be carried out in a well-heated butter or pork fat. Beets can be boiled in advance and only then added to the broth.

Vegetables. When cooking classic borscht With beets, the order in which the vegetables will be added is important: potatoes are placed in the broth 30 minutes before the soup is finally cooked, cabbage - 20 minutes, pre-prepared beets - 15 minutes before the end of cooking the dish. Vegetables that are poached in oil (carrots, parsley, onions) are also added to the broth 15 minutes before the end of cooking.

Spices. Towards the end of the cooking process, 5-8 minutes before the borscht is cooked, various spices are added. Garlic is added strictly 2 minutes before the end of cooking the borscht, so that it does not lose all its enchanting aroma. Garlic should be chopped or pounded in a mortar for full aroma and taste.

Spices. If you like to use different spices, then all your imagination can be shown here, the aroma will only be more intense, alluring and rich. But the main spices when preparing borscht are still taken to be greens or parsley root; it is allowed to use dried or fresh fruits, allspice black pepper (peas or ground), and bay leaves. If you want to add something special to the borscht, then dill, herbs or celery root, and coriander are ideal. But to prepare simple Ukrainian borscht, it is recommended to make a classic spicy dressing, for which you need to chop 200 g of lard into small pieces, pound 3-4 cloves of garlic and 2 sprigs of fresh parsley in a mortar. This aromatic mixture is added to the borscht a few minutes before it is ready.

There are sometimes more controversies around borscht than around politics. In fact, no one knows what proper borscht is. It should be tasty - that’s the main rule,” says Ilya Lazerson, president of the St. Petersburg Guild of Chefs. - Personally, I don’t like it when there are potatoes in borscht and Bell pepper. In my version there are none, and that is my right. Some people like sauerkraut and pre-boil or bake the beets. I like it more raw beets. I cut it into thin strips, add a little sugar, water, vegetable oil, and after 5 minutes add tomato paste. Then I stew the beets and add them to the pan at the very end of cooking. Thanks to this, the soup acquires a rich, appetizing shade. And this is just one of the secrets of delicious borscht.

1. With or without broth?

For vegetarian borscht, meat broth is not needed. But if you are a fan classic soup, which means you need to prepare a rich broth. For it, you can take beef brisket, chicken or pork and beef in a 1:1 ratio. It is better to pre-fry the pieces of meat for flavor. Or immediately put the meat on the bones in cold water and put it on fire. As soon as it boils, remove the foam, add salt, bay leaf, a few peas of black and allspice and cook for 2-3 hours until full readiness meat. Then you need to strain the broth, remove the meat from the bones, chop it and return it back to the pan.

2. Stew the beets separately!

If you put the beets in a common pan and then cook for about an hour, all the color will disappear from the vegetable and the borscht will turn out faded. To avoid this, you need to grate the root vegetable on a coarse grater or cut it into thin strips with a knife. Then add water, a teaspoon of sugar and be sure to have a little acid (a couple of tablespoons of wine vinegar or lemon juice), this will help the root vegetable retain its color. Place the beets on the fire and simmer until they become soft.

3. Or maybe cook?

The second popular option for preparing beets for borscht is to boil them in advance. It is important to rinse the vegetable thoroughly before immersing it in water, without cutting off the roots and top, otherwise the juice will “go” into the pan. For better preservation of the bright shade, do not salt the water, but pour 1/2 tsp into it. vinegar or citric acid. Cooking time depends on the size of the fruit and the season - young small root vegetables are usually cooked for 20-30 minutes, old ones - 1-1.5 hours. However, today most chefs advise baking beets rather than boiling them. To do this, wrap the fruit in food foil and place it in the oven for 30-40 minutes (time depends on the size of the tuber) at +180°C. In baked beets, the taste and color do not “dissolve” in water, so this method of preparation is considered the most successful.

4. Don't forget the cabbage

Many people call borscht beetroot soup. In fact, these are different soups. Borscht has cabbage, but beetroot soup does not. Most often, fresh white cabbage shredded into strips is used for borscht. But there may be variations on the theme. For example, you can put red cabbage or savoy cabbage in a pan - it looks similar to white cabbage, but has a bright green color and corrugated bubble leaves. There are even versions of borscht with cauliflower and Brussels sprouts, but with them you still get a soup that is far from the classic one. Some people like to add sauerkraut instead of fresh cabbage. It must be washed, chopped, simmered separately until soft and only then added to the borscht.

5. Unsweetened couple: onion and carrot

Nutritionists are against all sorts of sautés that add calories to the dish. But if we speak from the point of view of taste and gastronomic rules, then borscht without sautéing is not borscht. First on vegetable oil You need to fry the onion into strips, then add carrots cut into strips. When the vegetables acquire a golden hue, add tomato paste and simmer everything together for a few more minutes. Some housewives believe that it is better to use tomatoes instead of pasta - fresh or in own juice. Nevertheless, many professional chefs insist: only paste has the concentrated taste that is so necessary for the soup, which will give the borscht a beautiful color and pleasant sourness.

6. Vegetables - to taste

In addition to beets, carrots, onions and cabbage, other vegetables are added to the borscht to taste: potatoes, tomatoes and fresh sweet peppers, which are also chopped into strips. In general, do not forget that all products in the soup should be cut approximately equally. You can use any color of pepper: green, yellow, red, orange. The main thing is to maintain the proportion: there should be a lot of beets and cabbage in the borscht, and 2-3 times less potatoes, tomatoes and peppers.

One of the favorite first dishes of the peoples of Europe is beetroot soup. In Ukraine, this dish was called “borscht”. It is beets that give borscht its incredible aroma and bright burgundy color. IN different countries Borscht with beets is prepared in different ways. In this article we will tell you several step-by-step recipes on how to cook borscht with beets.

If you want your borscht with beets to be not burgundy, but red, then in this case you need to adhere to a special cooking technology.

We tell you in detail recipe for making borscht with beets beautiful red color:

  1. Peel 6 small beets. 4 of them need to be cut into cubes with a knife, and 2 grated on a coarse grater.
  2. Cut into cubes:
  • one onion
  • one carrot
  • several canned tomatoes
  • 6 new potatoes
  • one small head of white cabbage (should be chopped into strips)
  1. All the vegetables chopped at the previous stage must be placed in a large saucepan, filled with water and put on fire to cook the vegetable broth.
  2. After the broth boils (after half an hour), add to the borscht:
  • beets, grated
  • 3 tablespoons sugar
  • 3 tablespoons white wine or apple cider vinegar
  • ground black pepper

  1. In 10 minutes, after you add additional ingredients, the borscht with beets will be ready. It can be removed from the stove and poured into portioned plates.
  2. Garnish each serving with a dollop of sour cream and fresh dill.

How to cook borscht with beets and sauerkraut?

Next we will tell you, how to cook delicious borscht with beets and sauerkraut. By the way, this borscht is much healthier than with regular cabbage, although it has a certain astringency in taste. How to cook it:

  1. Boil the meat broth first. We recommend using beef, although this is not essential. You can choose the type of meat that you and your family love.
  2. Prepare vegetables for borscht:
  • grate one carrot on a coarse grater
  • dice one onion
  • fry onions and carrots in a frying pan
  • rinse a little sauerkraut and squeeze it out
  • cut the celery into strips
  • grate one beet on a coarse grater
  • add all of the above vegetables to the pan where the carrots and onions were stewed

  1. Cut the potatoes into cubes and place them in the pan where you are cooking the meat broth. Immediately add a few peas of black allspice and bay leaves.
  2. Pour the roasted vegetables into the broth. Let it simmer for another 15 minutes.
  3. Serve borscht with beets and cabbage with sour cream and garlic donuts.

How to cook borscht with beets and chicken?

Let's move on to the recipe, how to properly cook borscht with beets and chicken. The result will be a light but very tasty rich borscht that will appeal to people who adhere to the canons of dietary nutrition. What and why you need to do to prepare delicious beetroot borscht:

  1. Wash 3 chicken legs and cover them with cold water in a large saucepan. Immediately add pepper, salt and bay leaf.
  2. When the chicken broth boils, skim off any foam that has formed from it using a slotted spoon, then cover it with a lid and let the broth simmer for half an hour.
  3. During this time you can prepare the vegetables:
  • cut some potatoes into cubes
  • cut the onion into strips
  • grate one carrot and beet on a coarse grater
  • grate the garlic on a fine grater
  • shred one head of white cabbage

  1. All vegetables, except cabbage and potatoes, need to be fried in a heated frying pan. When they are sauteed, you need to pour a little into the frying tomato juice(half a liter) and one tablespoon of flour.
  2. Place potatoes and cabbage in broth. Let it all cook for 25 minutes.
  3. After this, add the broth to the broth and leave the borscht to boil for 10 minutes.
  4. Serve borscht with fresh herbs and a dollop of sour cream.

How to cook borscht with beets and beans?

Very filling, but at the same time Lenten borscht with beets is obtained, if instead of meat you add beans to the broth. Moreover, the beans can be fresh or canned - this is not a fundamental issue. How to prepare this soup:

  1. Soak one cup of beans in cold water. It should stay like this for at least a couple of nights.
  2. When the beans are ready, they will need to be washed and boiled in a saucepan for one hour.
  3. After this, you can add diced potatoes, allspice (several peas), and bay leaves to the water where the beans were cooked.
  4. While the potatoes are cooking, you need to prepare a vegetable dressing from:
  • carrots
  • beets
  • garlic
  • bell pepper

  1. The finished frying must be poured into a pan with potatoes and boiled for 10 minutes.

Please note that you do not need to add cabbage to borscht with beets and beans. You can do this if you wish, but it is not necessary. If you have it in your kitchen multicooker, you can cook borscht with beets and beans in it.

How to cook Ukrainian borscht with beets?

Now we will tell you how to cook delicious borscht with beets and tomato paste. This type of borscht is prepared in Ukraine, because in this country borscht is a traditional dish. What you need to do to prepare real Ukrainian borscht with beets:

  1. First prepare the pork broth:
  • place the meat in a saucepan, fill it with water, add peppers and onions;
  • as soon as the meat boils, drain the water, disassemble the meat into pieces so that there are no cartilages and bones in it, and pour in new water;
  • the second broth should boil for one hour.

  1. Add diced onion, grated carrots, allspice, garlic and bay leaf to the broth.
  2. Prepare frying from:
  • diced onion
  • julienned beets
  • tomato paste
  1. Pour the roast into the broth. Immediately add sour cream to the broth.
  2. Chop a head of white cabbage and then pour everything into the broth.
  3. Serve borscht with sour cream, fresh herbs and garlic donuts.

How to cook borscht with beets for the winter?

Some wonder how to cook borscht with beets and vinegar so as not to make it too sour. There is a great way out - make a sourdough starter for borscht, which can be used in winter and beyond. This will help significantly save time in the process of preparing borscht:

  1. First, the beets are chopped. You can also grate it on a coarse grater or in a food processor.
  2. Carrots are prepared in exactly the same way.

  1. A head of white cabbage is being chopped.
  2. One onion is cut into strips.
  3. All vegetables are mixed in one pan and filled with water.
  4. Add salt, pepper, bay leaf, sugar, oil and vinegar to the water. Everything is boiled for 20 minutes and then transferred to sterilized jars.

How to cook borscht with beets: photo



Borscht with beets is a unique dish, but its taste is unsurpassed. It is prepared from the most simple products, which everyone definitely has in their home. We hope that the recipes we present in this article will help you diversify the menu for your family.

Video: “How to cook borscht with beets?”