When we went to make this for dinner the other night, I was flabbergasted that we hadn’t posted it here yet. This is one of our very favorite summer meals, a Lithuanian cold beet soup, usually served with boiled potatoes and/or pickled herring. It’s a pretty simple recipe, and very tasty, though the color is a bit shocking to people who aren’t used to it :) This recipe probably serves about 4-6 people.
Ingredients
- 1 32oz bottle plain kefir (you can use buttermilk if necessary, but kefir is much better)
- Beets (you can use raw or canned, this recipe uses raw)
- Green Onion
- 4 hard-boiled eggs
- 1 large cucumber
- Dill (fresh if possible, but dried is fine, too)
- Salt
Directions
- If you’re using canned beets, skip the steps about cooking them and just chop them up in either a dice or a julienne – otherwise, continue as written :)
- Peel the beets, and chop them into small-ish pieces. Boil them in water until soft all the way through.
- While beets are boiling, hard-boil your eggs.
- Chop your green onion, cucumber and dill and set aside.
- Once beets are soft, drain them, but keep the cooking liquid as you will add some of it to the soup later. Let beets cool.
- Once the beets have cooled, cut them up. You can either dice them or julienne them.
- Add the beets to a large mixing bowl (over 32 oz).
- Add cucumber, dill and green onion to bowl.
- Peel and chop your eggs, and add to the bowl.
- Pour in full bottle of kefir.
- Pour some of the cooking liquid from the beets into the kefir bottle and shake it around to make sure you get all the kefir out, then pour into soup.
- Mix everything together well, and add more cooking liquid from the beets to taste.
- Salt to taste.
- Serve with boiled potatoes sprinkled with dill, or pickled herring and onions (or both).