Borscht with Mushrooms and Prunes
Lenten Christmas cooking had to produce a borscht with real body and no meat at all, and 50 g of dried porcini — a scant 2 oz, which is a lot, and deliberately so — does exactly that: soaked and then boiled, they leave behind a dark liquid that tastes like stock. The prunes are an old technique rather than a whim; boiled soft, they add a fruity sweetness that rounds off the sharpness of beet and tomato paste.
The beet simmers on its own for about an hour in a little of that broth with a spoonful of tomato paste. An hour sounds excessive until you know why: slow cooking in an acidic liquid keeps the betanin pigment from breaking down, whereas raw beet dropped straight into the pot goes pale within twenty minutes. The onion, carrot, and parsley root — a pale, celery-scented root sold at Eastern European groceries, with parsnip or celery root a fair substitute — are fried together with the flour, which loses its raw pastiness in the pan and lightly thickens the finished soup.
Buy pitted, unsmoked prunes; smoked ones bulldoze the mushroom broth you went to the trouble of making. Strain the mushroom soaking water through cheesecloth (grit always settles at the bottom) and pour it into the pot, since most of the aroma lives there. Serve with smetana, the thick full-fat sour cream of the region — regular full-fat sour cream is close enough. Like all borscht it improves overnight, and here the prunes keep sweetening the pot as it sits.
Part of Ukrainian cuisine — 447 more recipes in the section.
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Ingredients
Instructions
Soak the dried mushrooms to rehydrate, rinse them, then boil, remove from the broth, and chop. Strain the mushroom broth and bring to a boil.
Simmer the beet cut into strips for about an hour in a small amount of broth, adding a little tomato paste.
Shred the onion, carrot, and parsley root and fry them in oil with the flour.
Add the potatoes and cabbage to the boiling mushroom broth. Once it returns to a boil, add the mushrooms, the rinsed and boiled pitted prunes, the simmered beet, the fried vegetables, bay leaf, pepper, sugar, and salt, and cook a few minutes more.
Before serving, sprinkle with parsley.
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