Belarusian Pink Hands

Belarus shares a border with Russia, Ukraine, and Poland – all countries I considered for this challenge. So I went with the country stuck in the middle of them assuming that all three would find their way into Belarusian cuisine. I was not left disappointed; Bealarusian cuisine takes the term melting pot quite literally. An interesting fact about Belarus that I discovered is that it is a “coinless” country, meaning they don’t use coins and every bit of their currency is in notes. In fact they have thirteen different notes of varying values! I mean sure, you don’t have to deal with coins, but could you imagine having to sort through bills every time?

I found my recipe for this dish from a legit Belarusian site, and I mean legit! As in I had to search for a site that could translate Belarusian to read the recipe. I can only hope I was translating a recipe handed down from someone’s Belarusian grandmother. Lucky for me the soup has only three steps so even with the use of a poor translating site (as most of them are), I still understood what was going on.

So what did I choose from Belarus? I went with a soup. I haven’t done a soup yet but this was definitely different and very traditional, so I went for it. I decided on a beet soup called Borshch which can be served with sour cream and dill. The soup is Ukranian in origin, but it has been adapted by several other countries and each country has made it their own. In fact there are Romanian, Polish, Russian, even Chinese variations (to name a few). In fact in some countries it is served cold or mixed with cream. Then of course there is the Belarusian variation which uses tomatoes in addition to beets.

So I dyed not just my hand pink from cutting the beets needed for this, but also my cutting board and my spoon. I also scraped my pinkie while peeling my beet which was a little on the “I’ve been sitting around for too long” side. See what kind of sacrifices I’ve made for this blog? My lovely pink hands are the reason why I try to avoid cooking with beets, I mean I love beets, but they are a very messy vegetable.

Due to the tomato paste and the sad state of my beet, the soup wasn’t nearly as pink as I expected as I had seen photos of it. Mine was a dark red-orange color (it’s actually a bit darker and redder in person than the photo below). I suppose if I had used a fresher beet there would have been more of a pink tint from the juices, but this was definitely a very tinted soup, dying all the ingredients. One thing to remember, the longer you cook the soup, the more flavorful it is.

The soup itself is super tasty. The pink hands were worth it! Because of the tomato paste and beef stock, the broth doesn’t have an overly “beety” flavor and manages to absorb a lot of the flavor from the other vegetables. Cutting out the many adjectives I could use to describe this, let me just use one – delicious! Serve it with a thick slice of bread, sheer soup heaven. As you can tell, I definitely liked this soup and if blood red color doesn’t bother you, this is definitely something you want to try. I know when winter comes I’ll be making this one again; it’s a great alternative to the typical vegetable or cabbage soup I make during that time and I do love beets. One thing to note, if you are vegetarian you could swap the beef stock with vegetable stock no problem, there will be just as much flavor and the soup will taste just as great. That concludes country 10, whew! Six dishes this week was hard work! This next day or so I’ll be taking a little break to come up with my next 10 dishes.