Almost every cuisine of the world’s peoples has first courses in its arsenal. And meat soup is the hallmark of the cook: borsch or hodgepodge, shurpa or lagman. Main characteristic: there is a lot of meat in the dish (chicken, beef, lamb, pork - to choose from). More refined delicacies include meat soup from game, rabbit, and offal.
Popular among the people are the first dishes with meatballs, prepared sausages, smoked meats. And there are a great many recipes. In general, it goes without saying: in such a small article it simply does not seem possible to voice the whole variety of culinary dishes. Therefore, we will only talk about some of them.
Soup: meat solyanka
And let's try to cook it today! The culinary forums just go legends of hodgepodge. Consumers are asking for supplements: more, more - and half a pan as it never happened. Here is the soup! So, let's take: 200 g of pork, the same amount of cereal seeds, 100 g of sausages, 100 g of ham, 1 tbsp. a spoon of tomato paste, 50 g of butter, 1 onion, 2 pickles, 100 g of olives, bay leaf, pepper, herbs, salt - to taste, half a lemon.
How to cook
- Cook meat and bone broth. We take out the meat, and filter the broth through a sieve.
- In a frying pan in butter, fry the onion until golden, sliced in half rings. Add tomato paste and fry for another 5 minutes. After we add a small amount of broth and meat, cut into pieces.
- We clean the pickled (barrel) cucumbers from the peel (if small and dense, then we can not peel them) and cut into small cubes.
- Add the fried in a pan to the pan with strained broth and cook for 7-10 minutes. Then add black pepper, bay leaf, sliced ham, sausages, salt to taste and cook for another 5-7 minutes.
- When we bring to the table, in each plate we put several olives without stones, a spoonful of sour cream, a half ring of lemon with peel, finely chopped dill and parsley.
Carrots and potatoes
Soup recipe - meat solyanka - may include additional ingredients. For example, many housewives cannot do without the introduction of such components as potatoes with carrots. Then in the recipe for meat soup - a classic hodgepodge - add one large carrot and several medium potatoes. The vegetables need to be washed and peeled, and then cut into proportionate cubes. It is necessary to introduce them into the dish at the half-ready stage (in 15 minutes). And then prefabricated meat soup will be even richer in taste and aroma. Try it for sure!
Borscht
The recipe for meat soup in Ukrainian (or Russian) is probably known all over the world. Moreover, its three main varieties are prepared: red, green spring and summer cold. You can order borscht in a posh restaurant and in the student cafeteria. This is not only everyday food, it is also served at the festive table.
A bit of history
According to science, there are even written monuments dated to the 15th century, where the word "borsch" is mentioned. And linguists believe that the name of this national dish came from the name of the plant. Actually, this plant was added to borscht, until cabbage was brought to the Slavs. Beetroot is also an essential component of beetroot, which gives the dish a wonderful red color. She was extremely appreciated in ancient Greece, even sacrificed to Apollo. And in Kievan Rus it was known in the tenth century. There are a huge number of recipes for this dish. And in the eighteenth century, borsch was acidified with beet kvass. Actually, it was the basis not only of this dish, but also of others. Today, sourness is given by tomatoes (tomato paste) and lemon.
The secrets of delicious meat soup
- In southern Ukraine, red hot pepper was added to the borsch, which gave it a fiery taste. In some areas, millet or buckwheat was used as a component. Also interesting is the recipe for borsch with stockfish.
- In Podillia, Poltava and Transnistria, for example, beans were added to borscht and seasoned with “grout” - toasted flour diluted with sour cream. And Poltava introduced its own peculiarity - dumplings.
- In Western Ukraine, unlike Eastern, Central and Southern, where thick rich borsch is cooked, preference is given to liquid, without potatoes and cabbage. And root crops to it are served separately welded. Add and fry the onion, and grout from the toasted flour, seasoning it with homemade sour cream. A sweet and sour taste of borsch is given by cherry juice or a sour apple.
Be that as it may, there are traditional recipes for making this delicious meat soup, although in practice each housewife has her own personal recipe that she inherited from her mother or grandmother.
Ingredients
You need to take: 800 g of pork or beef on the bone (ribs), 3 l of water, 3 tablespoons of medium-sized beets. 2 carrots, 3 medium-sized potatoes, 1 parsley root, 2 small onions, celery root, half a head of cabbage, 2-3 fresh tomatoes or 100 g of thick tomato sauce, 1-2 bell peppers, half a glass of beet kvass, half a glass of sour cream. 1-2 tbsp. tablespoons of flour, 2 cloves of garlic, 2 teaspoons of sugar, several sprigs of parsley, dill, basil, a few grains of black and allspice, bay leaf, seasoning "Mediterranean herbs". And by the way, certain ingredients and their quantity can be changed according to your taste preferences. It all depends on whether you like borscht - thick or thin, on meat broth or lean.
Simple cooking!
- We place the washed meat with bones in cold water. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, remove foam, continue cooking over low heat. Add grains of black and allspice, bay leaf to the broth.
- While the broth is bubbling, prepare the vegetables. Cut the onion head in half, and celery and parsley - in strips. We spread it on a dry frying pan, fry them a little and transfer to the broth. Thus, the fried vegetables will give the borshch a special taste.
- Next, we do beets. Rub it on a grater or cut into strips. We do the same with carrots. Onion and bell pepper cut into half rings. In winter, you can use frozen pepper. We shift the vegetables into a pan with preheated fat (lard), add a few tablespoons of the broth and simmer, covering with a lid. When the vegetables are ready, pour the tomato sauce and sliced tomatoes.
- To restore the color of beets, which fades slightly when stewed, sprinkle the vegetables with lemon juice or apple (grape) vinegar.
- Cut the potatoes into arbitrary cubes, chop the cabbage into thin strips.
- And when the meat is ready, take it out, separate it from the bones, cut into pieces and return it back to the broth. We lay the potatoes, and after 10-15 minutes - the prepared cabbage.
- As soon as the potatoes and cabbage are cooked, season the borsch with a spoon of sour cream, adding to it a spoon of flour fried to golden color. To prevent the flour from clumping, add a teaspoon of salt and mix thoroughly. Pour it all into our meat soup, stir and add the stewed vegetable mixture. We add, pepper according to individual preferences.
- And here comes the turn of beet kvass. The amount of it depends on your taste. Actually, he will give the borsch a pleasant sourness and rich burgundy color.
Advice
- If beet kvass is not available, soup on meat broth is acidified with lemon or cherry juice (you can use a slice of sour apple, for example, Semerenko variety). But we do not recommend adding vinegar in this regard, pouring it into borsch is nonsense.
- If the beets are not sweet enough, add a little sugar to the borsch.
- We perform all the procedures very quickly so that the borsch is not overboiled. From this he will lose his taste. In the final (after turning off the fire) add 2 crushed cloves of garlic, chopped greens.
- If it so happened that the borsch was slightly boiled over, and its color turned pale, it is enough to take raw beets, grate it and put in the borsch. The color of the food will be restored.
- It is very important to adhere to the correct sequence for laying vegetables in a dish. Borsch will become tasty when each component sounds. We add acidic ingredients when potatoes and cabbage are almost ready. Otherwise, they simply get sick of acid. Bon appetit to everyone!