Borscht (beetroot soup) with meat croquettes - cook this Polish soup with me

Polish cuisine is diverse and awesome, but it’s not well-known in the world. Everybody seems to know Polish pierogi (dumplings), but other dishes popular in my country are not so famous. You might have heard about borscht, though. It’s one of our most liked soups, although we don’t make it too often, to be honest.

Borscht is a soup made of meat broth and beetroots. It can be served with dumplings or with croquettes. As croquettes are easier and faster to prepare, I’ll present this variant of the dosh to you. I made my borscht today, and all the pictures were taken by me.

For this dish, you’ll need:

around 0.5 kg of meat—various kinds of meat can be used here, but we use just chicken or beef, or both, but duck or rabbit would also be ok,
2 medium carrots,
1 medium parsley root,
small piece of celery root,
around 1,5-2 kg of beetroots,
some leaf bays,
some cloves,
some allspice,
ground pepper,
some salt,
some marjoram,
5 eggs,
some sugar,
some vinegar,
some lemon juice,
bread crumbs,
2 mugs of flour (around 320 g),
2 mugs (around 0,5 l) of milk (or water),
butter (or frying oil).

The helpful equipment would be:

four-liter pot
colander (or large sieve)
meat grinder

Preparation of the soup

Important: you will need to add the water at some stages of broth preparation because it’ll evaporate. It’s good to add it after you remove the meat and vegetables from it, and you may need to add it again after you remove the beetroots from the soup. Just try to maintain the quantity of 1,5 in a pot. This amount of soup should be enough to fill around 4 mugs. Usually, I drink 2 mugs, so this amount of soup is for 2 persons.

You’ll have to make the broth first. Place the meat in 3 liters of water and cook the broth. Also, add some salt—I used 1,5 tablespoons.

Remember about skimming off the fat and other impurities that accumulate immediately after the soup becomes to boil. If you do this, you’ll maintain a good clarity of the broth.

If you want the taste of the broth to be deep and meaty, you should cook it slowly for 2–3 hours, on a low flame. However, if you want to save some time, one hour will be enough to cook the meat and to make the broth, but its taste will be less intense because most of the good, tasty substances will stay inside the meat.

Today I’ve cooked my meat for over one hour because it was the base for the borscht. If I made pure broth as a soup, I would cook it for 3 hours. Here, in the borscht, the taste comes mainly from beetroots, spices and other ingredients, and meat croquettes are more tasty because all that is good was preserved in the meat thanks to the shorter time of cooking. There are various schools here, though—the final choice is up to you.

After some time, add vegetables (carrots, parsley, and a piece of celery root) to the broth, cook them until they become soft. Then you can remove both the meat and vegetables from the broth. Place them in a colander or a large sieve placed under the sink so that they drain and cool.

Meanwhile, wash the beetroots and peel them. Cut them into medium pieces and place them in your broth. Cook them for around 40–50 minutes. After that, remove them. I usually throw them in the trash bin—there is no use for them in my home, but if you have a dog, you can give them to your little friend. :)

While you’re cooking the beetroots in the broth, you need to grind the meat. Add some vegetables to it, but not all of them. Just add a small piece of carrot, parsley root, and celery root.

After you mince the meat with the vegetables, mix it with a spoon, or just with your hand, adding some ground pepper and salt.

Now you can finish making the soup. After you remove the beetroots, you are left with a red base for the borscht, but it requires some improvements.

Keep it cooking and add cloves, allspice, and leaf bays. Also, add some ground pepper, too. I pound the allspice and cloves in a mortar before I add them to the soup. You can just ground those spices, too.

Then add some lemon juice and vinegar to the soup, adding some sugar, too. It’s difficult to tell how much of these ingredients you should use. I like when the borscht is intensely sour and sweet at the same time, so I add a juice squeezed from 1 big lemon and several tablespoons of vinegar, followed by 4–5 tablespoons of sugar. Some people like the soup to be milder, though, so they’re more moderate about the usage of those ingredients. It’s all up to you.

At the very end, when your borscht is ready, add some marjoram. It’s a significant spice in this soup, and it adds more sweetness to it.

Preparation of the croquettes

You should now have the minced meat ready. This is the stuffing for your croquettes. You have to make the rest.

The batter for croquettes is the same as for pancakes, except that no sugar is added to it. You’ll need:

2 mugs of flour,
2 mugs of water (or milk - it’s up to you),
2 tablespoons of butter (or oil),
3 medium eggs for batter + 2 additional eggs to scramble in a bowl for frying the croquettes,
1,5 teaspoons of salt.

The milk and the eggs shouldn’t be too cool. Take them out of the refrigerator beforehand so that they warm up to room temperature.

Place all ingredients in a bowl and combine them with a mixer. You should get a perfectly smooth dough, without any lumps.

Preheat a flat pan, preferably one specially designed for frying pancakes, about 20-23 cm in diameter. Do not immediately set the highest power of the burner. Set to medium power and wait until the heat is evenly distributed over the surface of the pan. Do not grease the pan—you'll pour the batter into the dry, hot pan.

Use a small ladle to pour the batter into the pan. Pour enough batter onto the heated pan to comfortably cover its entire surface.

While you're doing this, hold the pan in the air over the burner, moving it around so that the batter spreads across the pan. Then put the pan back on the burner. After a minute, flip the pancake to the other side, frying it again for about 40 seconds.

In a bowl, scramble 2 eggs handily. Sprinkle breadcrumbs on a plate. Dip the wrapped croquettes in the scrambled eggs, then roll them in the breadcrumbs. In a frying pan, heat the oil and drop the croquettes into it. Fry them until they are nicely browned on both sides.

Now both your borscht and croquettes are ready. The soup is served in cups, or in mugs. Croquettes are served separately, on a plate. All you have to do is eat croquettes like pancakes, sipping them with borscht :)

I hope you’ll like this recipe. You can experiment with the acidity and sweetness of the soup, as there are many options here.