Once I tried Lithuanian cold kefir borscht with a friend and just fell in love with it! This borscht may well become a worthy alternative to our usual okroshka - the Russian version of cold borscht.
In principle, the Lithuanian version of cold borscht is not much different from the Russian counterpart. The main difference is that boiled beets are added to Lithuanian cold borscht and such borscht is seasoned with kefir.
And one more interesting aspect - boiled potatoes are not put in Lithuanian cold borscht, they are served with borscht as an addition and they eat holodnik with boiled potatoes as a bite.
We will prepare all the products according to the list.
First of all, boil potatoes, beets and eggs. I usually boil beets and potatoes together in the same pot. I pour the vegetables with cold water, let the water boil and cook them until fully cooked. I check the readiness of vegetables by piercing them with a knife, if the knife easily enters the vegetables, they are ready. Drain the water from the vegetables, let them cool completely and peel them.
To boil the eggs, boil water in a saucepan and carefully place the eggs in the water, cook hard-boiled eggs, 6-7 minutes. We drain the water from the eggs, cool them and remove the shell.
Radishes and fresh cucumber cut into strips or quarters.
Put the vegetables in a bowl.
Cut the eggs into small cubes and also transfer to a bowl.
We rub the boiled beets on a coarse grater.
Put the beets in a bowl with the rest of the ingredients.
dill greens and green onion chop finely with a knife.
Put the greens in a bowl.
Pour all the ingredients of Lithuanian cold borscht with kefir.
Important: kefir should not be very acidic. It is better to take fatter kefir.
Mix well all the ingredients with kefir. If the borscht turns out to be thick, add a little cold boiled water. It's time to salt the borscht. Let it brew in the refrigerator for literally 20-30 minutes.
Pour the cold borscht into portioned plates, decorate with boiled egg quarters and serve with slices of boiled potatoes and fresh bread.
Bon Appetit!
During the winter cold, we want hot cocoa with a pie. And in the summer heat, we want to refresh ourselves with something light and tasty. In such cases, many remember okroshka. But I suggest you cook Kholodnik or Lithuanian borscht. You may have heard about this dish under a different name - Beetroot. It will be a great alternative to okroshka.
Cold borscht or boiled beetroot chiller
Kitchen tools: saucepan, two bowls, grater, board, knife.
Ingredients
| Boiled water (cold) | 3 l |
| boiled beets | 2-3 pcs. |
| boiled eggs | 3-4 pcs. |
| fresh cucumbers | 2-4 pcs. |
| green onion | 5-6 stems |
| Dill | 1 bunch |
| Ham | 300-400 g |
| Mustard | to your taste |
| Sugar | to your taste |
| Vinegar | to your taste |
| Sour cream | to your taste |
| Salt | to your taste |
Step-by-step recipe for classic cold borscht
Cooking broth
Cooking topic
Pour a couple of spoons of topic into a plate, pour borscht and add a little sour cream. Bon Appetit! 
Bon Appetit!
video recipe
The video shows how to make cold borscht Beetroot soup.
Summer gives us a lot of greens and vegetables, which make a wonderful - green borscht -. And from beets you will cook a bright and tasty - red borscht -.
Cold borscht with pickled beets
Cooking time: 1 hour.
Serving Amount: 7-8.
Kitchen tools: pan, knife, board.
Ingredients
Step by step recipe
Preparing the Ingredients
- Cut about three hundred grams of pickled beets into small pieces. Throw into boiling water.
- Add a tablespoon of vinegar. Add salt as you wish.
- After boiling, cook for 2-3 minutes. Pour in 1-2 more tablespoons of vinegar and let cool.
- We chop all the greens.
- We cut peeled cucumbers into cubes (3-6 pcs.).
- We also cut sausage (250-300 g).
- Cut 3-5 eggs into small pieces.
Serve borscht
All ingredients can be added to beetroot broth and mixed in a saucepan. But you can do it in a bowl.
video recipe
The video shows the process of making this borscht.
Did you know, that - borscht in a slow cooker - turns out to be incredibly tasty and preserves almost everything useful material ingredients included in it?
Cold Lithuanian borsch on kefir
Cooking time: 1 hour.
Serving Amount: 7-8.
Kitchen tools: frying pan, bowl, board, knife.
Ingredients
Step by step recipe
- Cut 200-300 grams of beets into small strips.
- Finely cut cucumbers (4-6 pcs.).
- Also finely chop the radish (7-8 pcs.).
- We mix everything in one bowl.
- We chop the whole onion (2-3 stalks), a bunch of dill and sprinkle with salt so that the greens release the juice.
- We send salted greens to beets.
- For dressing, mix 2-4 tablespoons of sour cream, horseradish and 100-150 ml of kefir. Horseradish add to your taste.
- We cut 4-6 eggs and send them to vegetables.
- Pepper and salt as you like. Pour dressing over vegetables and stir. Add the remaining kefir.
- Mix well. We put the borscht in the refrigerator for several hours.
Lithuanian borsch goes well with scalding potatoes “in their uniforms”, fried in lard or oil. Bon Appetit!
video recipe
The video shows how real Lithuanian borscht should look like.
What are your associations with Ukrainian cuisine? Of course - Ukrainian borsch—. Check out one of his options. If prepared in time necessary ingredients, then cold beetroot it's not that hard to cook. It will be a great outlet on a hot day. What recipes for summer cold dishes do you know? Write in the comments.
Let's boil hard-boiled eggs. After boiling water - 8 minutes, then lower them into cold water. I assume that you all know this, but I wrote it just in case. :)
Next, three boiled beets on a coarse grater. Personally, I preserve a large amount of it in the fall. Therefore, I simply take a three-quarter can of canned beets and spread the contents into a saucepan. Also there are three cucumbers. If they are not homemade, it is better to cut off the skin. If the cucumber is long, then about half a cucumber.
Finely chop the green onion feathers, put them on a plate, add a pinch of salt and grind with a fork or whatever. 
Add onion and chopped dill to the pot. I don’t grind the last one, I don’t even know why, it’s probably a habit. I used fresh frozen in this recipe. 
Well, now we add kefir, sour cream mixed with water, chopped eggs to the pan, mix and test for salt-acid. I always manage to add about 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. Salt is about 1 tablespoon, with a small slide. But here you must regulate yourself.
And yet, if you do not have such fatty kefir, then it is quite possible to use the usual one. And in general, always be guided by your taste - if you want, then it is quite possible to increase the amount of kefir by 500 grams. Serve cold Lithuanian borscht with hot, boiled potatoes or brown bread.
(Bulgarian tarator, Uzbek chalop, Turkish Jajik, Iranian mast-o-hyar, Indian rait).
In the photo - my version of the Lithuanian refrigerator. Saltas barsciai (literally "cold borscht"). More often it is called Saltibaršciai, in the Samogitian dialect (western Lithuania) - Šaltėbarštē.
Honestly, I don’t know how to correctly pronounce its name in Russian: there are forms like “shaltibarshchai” and “shaltibarshchai”, but I did not understand if they depend on the case. I watched several videos where foreigners and residents of Lithuania, incl. professional chefs show how they prepare this dish: in most cases, the pronunciation "shaltibarsch" is heard. I also like to call this dish that way, with a Samogitian accent, the main thing is to understand what it is and how to cook it.
In about 90 cases out of 100, this dish is now cooked on kefir, but this was not always the case.
To trace the history of šaltibarščiai, several sources must be brought up. This is a fragment of the Lithuanian-English dictionary of 1915 edition.
It talks about the sour liquid and beet leaves in the composition of this dish.
And these are pages from the book. "1 000 delicious meals"(1959 edition):
In this book, in the "Cold Soups" section, tips are also given for making kvass, bread and beetroot (see photo of recipes from this book in; the link opens in a new window).
In the same book, in the section "Cold diet meals", the recipe is given cold borscht on yogurt:
AND the very first, perhaps, public Russian-language mention of kefir in the recipe of Lithuanian cold borscht. Postcards from the series "Dishes of the Peoples of the USSR". This particular set, "Dishes of Lithuanian Cuisine", was published in Moscow in 1974 (with the participation of Lithuanian professional culinary specialists). I don't know if exactly the same set came out before 1974, but I remember that sets with dishes of different national cuisines published in different years.
Consequently, in the form in which this dish exists now, it also took shape no earlier than the 1970-80s, like other similar dishes on kefir. For more details, see my article about kefir in cold soups and the story about the Belarusian cold soup (links at the beginning of the article).
For comparison. A recipe given by a popular Russian chef Ilya Lazerson in his thin book "Lithuanian Cuisine" (2005 edition).
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In Lithuania, the traditions of making beet kvass and sour beets are still preserved, and in some places they cook cold borscht with whey and / or yogurt. So the Lithuanian cold borsch on kefir is an exclusively modern phenomenon. Whether Belarusian recipes influenced this, or vice versa, the Lithuanian version was taken as the basis in Belarus, I also can’t say, but in my opinion, Belarusian recipes for cold soups on kefir were published in books after 1974 (after postcards with a recipe for Lithuanian cold borscht).
Nevertheless, in Lithuania now they are very strongly attached to the "kefir" option. That's what they call him in Poland "Lithuanian refrigerator" (Chłodnik litewski). In Russian-speaking regions, this dish is called either "Lithuanian cold borscht (Lithuanian cold borscht on kefir)", or "Lithuanian cold soup".
Interesting about Russian cold borscht on kefir I learned only recently, namely from the book "Modern Russian Homemade Cuisine" by Oksana Putan, who puts it in second place in the list of cold soups after okroshka (?) It is also interesting that almost all Russian-speaking Internet culinary experts consider this variant of borscht to be Lithuanian (Baltic), sometimes mentioning the existence of Belarusian variants. And before that, I had not met him called "Russian". Okroshka on kefir is not considered, it is a slightly different dish.
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How modern Lithuanian cold borscht is prepared
In Lithuania, for the preparation of such a dish, they are now producing special kefir with a fat content of 5-9%.
Photo from the Internet
With the technology of preparation, everything is simple: beets are taken boiled, but in most cases marinated is used, as it should be according to tradition. It is cut (taken out of the jar), poured with kefir, salt (sometimes also sugar), chopped green onions, fresh cucumber, boiled eggs, dill are added. It happens that boiled egg or they don’t put a cucumber, but kefir is diluted with boiled water, milk, sour cream or yogurt to your taste. The dish turns out to be very thick, it can only be called a "soup" with a stretch.
I cooked according to my proven technology, relying on Lithuanian sources.
In Hungarian stores you can find several types of kefir, incl. different fat content. I took not the "Caucasian", which we have here is liquid, but the one that looks more like yogurt (fat content 3%).
Boiled beets with lemon juice. Kefir whipped with a decoction, combined with chopped beets. Separately rubbed chopped green onions with dill and salt. I left everything in the fridge. Before serving, mix everything well, mix, add chopped boiled egg.
How to cook potatoes for this borscht, I spied on Lithuanian chefs, but the serving was invented by me. Wash the young tubers, boil directly in the peel until almost cooked (so that you can pierce with a knife blade). With a pusher or a wide blade of a knife, gently press on the tuber so that it cracks, but retains its shape. Peel the garlic, also crush with a knife blade, put 1 clove on each potato. sprinkle vegetable oil, optionally sprinkle with herbs and bake for 15 minutes in the oven at a temperature of 180 C (until golden brown).
Usually potatoes are served with Lithuanian borscht on a separate plate. I have a potato right in the soup bowl to focus on this and so that it is clearly visible in the photo. I once said that I don’t like eating hot potatoes with cold soup, so I didn’t like this combination.
Potatoes are served with almost any Lithuanian cold soup. Probably, this tradition, as I already said in the story about the Belarusian holodnik, arose in the famine years.
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The shaltibarsch in the Baltics has relatives: Aukstā zupa (" cold soup"; Latvia) and külm supp / Külmsupp peediga ("cold soup" / "cold beetroot soup"; Estonia).
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It is advisable not to confuse "Lithuanian cold borscht" and "Lithuanian (Starolitovskiy) borscht". The latter is served hot, although it can also be prepared with pickled beets.
"1,000 Delicious Dishes" (Vilnius, 1959 edition)
Interestingly, one of the variants of the Baltic borscht ( Žemaitiški barščiai; Samogitian borscht) in some sources it is called botvinya. In Lithuanian-Russian dictionaries, šaltibarščiai, by the way, was also called "botvinya" until the 2000s and even later, which directly indicates the traditional preparation of this dish.
Lithuanian-Russian dictionary (2005 edition):
In general, "botvinyazhi / botvinyazhe" in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania are the ancestors of the "bulbash", i.e. those who ate botvinya even before they knew about potatoes. About botvinya - both Russian and Belarusian-Lithuanian, I was also asked to tell, and I am preparing such an article.
Borscht recipes
1 hour 10 minutes
70 kcal
5/5 (2)
Cold borscht or beetroot, as we call it, is familiar to everyone since childhood. It was they who fed us our mothers and grandmothers on an unforgettable summer vacation. This dish not only satiates, but also quenches thirst and saves from the exhausting summer heat, and it is also so simple that it can be easily prepared even in field conditions.
So, today we will get acquainted with the one who came to us from Lithuania classic recipe cold borscht, which has long become familiar in our cuisine.
Cold Lithuanian borsch on kefir
Kitchen tools: You won't need any special tools other than a saucepan, cutting board, and knife.
Ingredients
How to choose the right ingredients
- To make cold borscht or boiled beetroot cold soup colorful and rich in taste, choose the brightest and sweetest varieties of beets. So, Bordeaux will cope with the task with a bang.
- The fat content of the kefir used depends on how high-calorie the dish you want to cook. By itself, cold borscht turns out to be quite dietary, so if your soul and husband crave something more satisfying, feel free to choose fatter kefir.
A step-by-step recipe for making cold kefir borscht
Lithuanian cold borscht video recipe
You don't need to know Lithuanian to know all the intricacies of how to make cold borscht. Just watch this video and everything will fall into place in no time.
Quick cold borscht with pickled beets
- Cooking time: 15 minutes + 30 minutes in the refrigerator.
- Servings: 4.
- Kitchen tools: this very camping recipe will require you to have a saucepan and a knife with a cutting board.
Ingredients
Step-by-step recipe for making quick cold borscht
- Chop the cucumber into cubes.
- Cut the radish into half rings.
- Chop green onions and parsley.
- Cut the ham into cubes too, but do not grind too much - the average size will be just right.
- Pour into a saucepan canned beets together with the marinade (if it comes in large pieces, rub it first), add 1 liter of boiled water, Apple vinegar, salt, sugar, pepper and mustard. Mix everything well and add all the other chopped ingredients.
- Cover the finished borscht with a lid and leave in the refrigerator for 30-40 minutes to finally brew and cool.
- Serve cold borscht with sour cream and half a boiled egg.
Video recipe for quick cold borscht
When a man is working in the kitchen, and even real gourmet, it's really mesmerizing. The hero of this video not only gets great pleasure from culinary process, but also infects everyone else with a thirst for gastronomic experiments. See for yourself!
Secrets of cold borscht
- Kholodnik, as we used to affectionately call this dish, in Lithuania it is customary to serve with a few slices of boiled potatoes which are a great substitute for bread.
- You can cook wonderfully delicious cold borscht not only on kefir, but also on other fermented milk products: ayran, curdled milk, whey. Vegetable juices, cold broth, water and even kvass are also used.
- In order for the beets to retain their bright color during the boiling process, as soon as the water boils, add a little acetic acid to it.
Borscht cooking options
Cook with pleasure and share your wishes with us in the comments! Have you ever cooked cold borscht? How did you like the recipe? If you know special secrets that will help make this dish even tastier, be sure to share with us. Bon Appetit!
