How to Make Ukrainian Borscht | America’s Test Kitchen 

I add beans to my bortsch, they make it even heartier

There is no T in borsch.

Love you guys for this!🙏🏻👏🏻🥰

What about thinly shredded cabbage?! I add it at the end because I like when it’s still slightly crispy! Yum!

I was born in Ukraine. We say that there are as many versions of borscht as the number of cooks. My recipe is vegetarian and can keep in a fridge for almost a week – I make a huge pot. I use beet greens too. I put in cabbage much later so it’s almost crunchy. Also, I don’t let beet mixture to cook in the soup for more than a minute in order to preserve red color of the beets. My family loves borscht❣️

Borshch should be a deep, jewel-like bright red color. Ukrainian cooks know how to achieve that. Also, why discard the onions and carrots. Chop them up and leave them in the soup!

Interesting, we are from Arkansas up in the mountains and my grandma and ma made.this during the winter but we know it as beet stew. Who knew y'all had another name for it.

Companion recipe development article:

"Not long into our conversation about borscht and the recipe I’d been working on, Darra Goldstein warned me to brace for the inevitable.

“You’ll print the recipe, and probably people will say, ‘Well, that’s not how my family makes it,’” she said with a good-natured chuckle on a video call from her home in the Berkshires.

The acclaimed author and scholar of Slavic cuisines was sharing her take on what constitutes a proper bowl of hot borscht in Ukraine, the soup’s ancestral home, and couldn’t help but note that it’s a divisive subject. She named beets, of course, for their earthy sweetness and vivid color, as well as green cabbage, carrots, onions, and potatoes—staple crops that grow abundantly in Ukrainian soil. Pork, the cuisine’s default protein, for building up a meaty backbone. Acidity from vinegar, lemon juice, tomatoes, or kvass, to invigorate the broth. Sour cream plopped onto each serving at the table, followed by feathery dill. Good bread alongside.

These markers are as classic as they are controversial because borscht is all about resourcefulness—a meal that’s cobbled together from whatever raw materials a cook has on hand. So it’s bound to vary, and each version becomes a cook’s tradition: similar to, but not the same as, someone else’s.

“It’s one thing that people can always agree to disagree on,” said Vitaliy Poylin. A Chicago-based Kyiv native who has spent decades honing his own formula, he described how the dish is so ubiquitous in Ukrainian life that home cooks don’t even bother debating who makes a superior version.

“It’s OK if yours is a little different, because I know mine is better,” he joked, emulating Ukrainians’ stubborn pride in their individual approaches.

And yet, Poylin stressed that there are unifying threads. Even the humblest pots nourish with all the trappings of a complete meal. There are hot and cold styles, which make borscht evergreen and adaptable to the seasons—restorative in winter, festive at holidays, refreshing on a hot day. Above all, borscht is so ingrained in the mealtime routine that neither native cooks nor the diaspora can imagine life without it.

“I think most Ukrainians, if you would ask them, do they bleed red? They would say they bleed borscht,” said Jason Birchard, owner and third-generation proprietor of Veselka, New York City’s iconic Ukrainian diner.

Even meat-fortified borscht is considered a vegetable soup, so I made stock with a modest 2 pounds of boneless pork butt. As it simmered for nearly 2 hours, the collagen-rich meat rendered the liquid full-bodied and mildly savory. I skimmed the fat and chopped the pork into pieces to add back to the pot before serving.

Meanwhile, there were vegetables to prep and cook. The goal is that nothing takes too long to soften and that the doneness of the hard roots and softer cabbage, potatoes, and onion sync up. Also, as striking as beets are, they shouldn’t overtake the soup; they should simply pull it all together.

Hence, Poylin said, many cooks take a shred, sauté, and simmer approach: Shred the beets, carrots, and cabbage; chop the onions and potatoes; and briefly sauté the beets and carrots so that the high heat softens them before they hit the broth. It worked well: Start to finish, the sautéed beets and carrots softened more quickly than they did when simmered from raw; plus, the oil and high heat intensified their flavors.

The sauté step also allowed me to brown the tomato paste I’d added for that critical undercurrent of brightness, boosting its depth. (Fresh tomatoes weren’t worth using in winter; canned lacked intensity.) Then I deglazed the pan with reserved broth.

I tipped the beet mixture into the pot, where the cabbage and potatoes were nearly tender, and briefly simmered everything to meld the components. Into the ruddy broth I stirred the chopped pork, plenty of dill, and lemon juice for an even brighter burst of acidity. I let everything sit for a few hours—because if there’s one thing about borscht that’s undisputed, it’s that some serious flavor magic happens when the soup has time to rest.

“It really should sit overnight for the flavors to develop,” said Goldstein, noting that a fresh batch never tastes as full and balanced. “Even after three days, five days if it lasts that long, is when I like it best, because it just gets a really deep, deep flavor.” In fact, Goldstein said, she had recently stumbled on a batch in the back of her freezer from a year earlier. “I took it out, not knowing how it would be. And it was so good.” (Annie Petito – Senior Editor, Cook's Illustrated Magazine, Jan/Feb 2023)

Free Ukraine!!

Borscht is also part of the Russian and Jewish cuisine… 🙂