Welcome Back to YouRoots! We are on a mission to help you incorporate more plants into your lifestyle and to teach you how to make nutritious wholefoods as delicious as possible. The better you can make the good stuff taste, vegetables, the more of them you’ll eat! Always remember that the things you decide to put into your body will have a direct impact on your short and long term health both physically & mentally.
Today we are giving you a shortcut to some beautiful plant based Borscht Soup packed full of antioxidants with some Crispy Candy Beets & Zucchini Flowers as garnish in only 20 minutes! Both Chef Bernie and Conrad went for a 30km run prior to filming this episode and felt re-energized after eating this amazing soup!
Few quick facts on this awesome soup – Borscht is a sour soup common in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. In English, the word “borscht” is most often associated with the soup’s variant of Ukrainian origin, made with beets as one of the main ingredients, which give the dish its distinctive red color. Its popularity has spread throughout Eastern Europe and the former Russian Empire, and – by way of migration – to other continents.
Source – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borscht
We were lucky enough to use fresh beets from Chef Bernie’s garden for the soup today! If you don’t garden, you should definitely start as you will have access to a lot of organic vegetables throughout the summer and into the fall.
The zucchini flowers were picked fresh as well!
As always we have our cooking show linked below for detailed instruction on how to re-create this beautiful dish.
You’ll need the following ingredients below for today’s recipe.
Ingredients
Borscht Soup
- 4 Medium beets
- 1 medium yellow onion
- 3 cloves of garlic
- Pinch of caraway seeds
- Fresh rosemary
- Splash of Olive Oil
- Salt Pepper to taste
- 1 medium potato
- 2 tbsp Nutritional Yeast
- 2 cups of vegetable stock
- Chili powder to taste
Garnish
- 4 fresh Zucchini flowers as garnish
- 1 tsp of brown sugar
- 1 medium candy beet sliced thinly (as thin as possible so they crisp up!)
The first thing we will want to do is prep and get the candy beet chips into the oven! take your candy beet and peel it (if you don’t have any candy beets, regular beets will do the trick as well!). Thinly slice it, the thinner it is, the crispier the chips will be. Take 1tsp of brown sugar sprinkle it over the beets, rub it in, put them onto a baking pan with parchment paper and get into the oven for 15 minutes at 400. Check them to ensure they do not burn!
Time to get the soup going! Prep your beets by peeling them and cutting them into cubes. If you don’t want to stain your hands, use a glove!
Grab your pot and set to high heat with 1 tbsp olive oil. As it’s heating up, dice your onions and garlic, add into the pan once heated and cook until golden brown, should only take a few minutes. Next add your beets and give everything a good stir for a minute. Add in all of the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil, boil on medium heat for 15 minutes.
If you want, save a couple of the beet cubes for garnish. Put everything into your mixer and blend! This will help the soup become creamy.
Now that the soup is ready, get it into a bowl or soup plate. Let’s quickly get our garnish ready, it will only take a few minutes. Take a pan, heat a bit of grape seed oil on high heat. Once heated, take the zucchini flowers and fry them for one minute on each side along with the rosemary.
Place the garnish on the dish, get creative as it’s up to you in terms of how it will look!
Thanks again for taking time out of your day and we really hope that you are finding value out of our blog posts and a few laughs from our videos. Stay tuned for another weekly blog post with another great recipe.
If you have any feedback or comments, good or bad, please let us know below, we welcome all feedback as we are always looking to improve. From the both of us remember to be positive, live with purpose and eat nutritious and delicious wholesome plant based foods!
