An undeservedly forgotten dish was once considered royal and requiring the skill of an experienced chef, and beet leaves excelled the well-known sorrel and parsley. Our grandmothers revered beetroot soup no less than bread and porridge, putting it on a par with chicken broth and borsch.
What is tops?
Tops are fresh leaves of beets, mostly young, without hard veins, although some lovers eat chopped stems.
Beet tops for soup has its own name: baland, which in Lithuanian means “quinoa”. What is quinoa? This is the grass that our great-grandmothers also added to green soups along with nettles, dandelion leaves and green onion shoots. Just a hundred years ago, tops were an invariable component of classic borsch, but for some unknown reason they stopped adding it.
What is the name of this soup?
Beetroot soup, the recipe of which is given in the article, is called Botvina (in some regions of Russia - Botvinnik). In fact, this is a type of cold summer soup, where sour kvass and various greens are the basis: young beet leaves, spinach and sorrel, dill and feathers of green onions. Resourceful housewives and supporters of a healthy diet add young leaves of carrots, nettles, quinoa and watercress. Also, boiled fish is added to the botvini separately - then the soup is considered to be “full”, and if without fish - lean.
Modern cuisine offers several options for this wonderful soup, but some of them violate the essence of this dish: Botvigny is a cold soup, that is, not a vegetable or meat broth cooked with vegetables (potatoes, carrots and others), with the addition of chopped greens, like for example, green sorrel borsch. Also ignorant people confuse Botvinnik with okroshka, not knowing the subtle difference between these dishes.
Classic Soup Recipe Product Kit
The following products are used for this soup:
- Beet tops with root vegetables - three small pieces (leaflets must be at least twenty).
- Fresh cucumbers - 2-3 small pieces so that there are no seeds.
- 0.7 liters of sour (light) kvass.
- Half a lemon.
- One bunch of green onions, dill and any other herbs.
- Fillet of any red fish - 300 grams + 200 grams of white river fish. According to some versions, only white fish is taken - the cook decides.
- Grated horseradish root - 1-2 tbsp. spoons.
- Salt, black pepper to taste and thick sour cream for serving.
Young beetroot soup with tops is an undeservedly forgotten work of culinary art that requires a lot of attention when cooking. Despite the fact that he was appreciated by gourmets from high society, his fame gradually came to naught due to the fact that in Soviet times they began to consider the poor soup as botany.
Cooking process
First, fish is boiled in a small amount of water with seasonings and black pepper. Without removing from the broth, it should be cooled and only after complete cooling take out, cut into portions, removing the seeds.
The same broth can be used for scalding greens, which are first finely (but not mashed) cut and dipped in a boiling broth for a couple of minutes. Next, discard the greens in a colander so that the glass is liquid. Peel the cucumbers, finely chop into cubes. Beet root vegetables are peeled, rubbed on a coarse grater and lightly stained in the same water, in no case boiling.
Prepare dressing: mix zest and lemon juice, mustard and horseradish, as well as 1 teaspoon of sugar and dilute with a small amount of kvass. Let the sauce stand for ten minutes and pour in the remaining kvass. Next, put chopped cucumbers, previously cooked greens into the mixture and send to the refrigerator for at least two hours so that the products exchange taste and aroma.
Before serving, soup is poured into a plate, two pieces of fish (one white and one red each), and also a spoon of sour cream are put. The soup is served cold and in the summer heat is an excellent meal for lunch.
How useful is this dish?
Soup with beets and tops is ideal for people who want to lose weight, because the calorie content of such a dish is only 50 kcal per 100 grams of the product, and the presence of vital vitamins C, E, B makes Botvine indispensable for vascular and digestive diseases.
The presence of choline in the tops of beets helps to restore the proper functioning of the liver, preventing it from “overgrowing” with fat, and the presence of pectin regulates the functioning of the intestines, stimulating the removal of toxic substances that settle in it as a result of improper nutrition and eating foods with high fat content.
For patients with diabetes, anemia and diseases associated with improper metabolism, beetroot soup will be a reliable assistant in overcoming these ailments, and for supporters of a healthy diet - an excellent variety of diets.
Instead of fish, you can add any kind of seafood to botvini: crayfish or crab meat, scallops, mussels or shrimp - after all, this soup is considered a mixture of fish soup (soup) and okroshka, from which kvass and greens are present. Therefore, you can experiment with the ingredients, finding your unique recipe for Botvigny and returning a long-forgotten dish to a new life.