Russian cabbage soup - an old recipe based on the addition of homemade sauerkraut. Among housewives in Russia, as well as in most countries of the former Soviet Union, fermentation of this vegetable is quite widespread. This process is especially popular among rural residents. Preparations are made after the harvest is completed, in late autumn. You can store them for quite a long time in a cold place, using them as needed when preparing various dishes, for example, real cabbage soup made from sauerkraut.
The dish has one characteristic feature: it becomes much tastier a day after cooking. This is one of the main reasons that Russian housewives prefer to use large pots to prepare such soup, so that the remainder from lunch can be put in the refrigerator, and then simply reheated a few hours later.
Our article will present the reader with a recipe for Russian cabbage soup, proven over the years. Here we will tell you in detail how to prepare this wonderful treat - classic Russian sour cabbage soup.
Ingredients
Cooking Russian cabbage soup from sauerkraut step by step
Rinse the pork well and cover with cool water.
Boil for approximately 90 minutes from the moment the water boils, adding a small piece of carrot and a quarter of an onion.
Squeeze the cabbage from the juice, cut into strips if necessary, and then simmer over medium heat, adding sunflower oil, for 20-25 minutes.
Peel the onion and roughly chop it.
Also cut the peeled carrots into thin strips, or grate them using a coarse grater.
Fry carrots and onions in a separate frying pan, adding sunflower oil.
Peel the potatoes, wash them, cut them into strips, and add them to the boiling broth with the pork.
After 10 minutes, add the cabbage to the pan.
Let cook for another 15 minutes, add the fried onions and carrots.
Salt, pepper, season everything with your favorite spices. Let simmer at low boil for 20-25 minutes. Remove the pan with the finished soup from the heat. Let it brew for half an hour, and then serve it with sour cream, garlic, and crackers.
Three important and useful tips on how to cook excellent Russian cabbage soup from sauerkraut.
Cabbage soup– one of my favorite dishes of Russian cuisine! This love for cabbage soup is apparently caused by the fact that my grandfather is from the Urals and is popular in our family Russian cabbage soup has always been higher than Ukrainian borscht (without disparaging). Russian cabbage soup– the dish is not tricky and very tasty. There are quite a few options cabbage soup recipe, and not all are successful. Communicating with my friends and close acquaintances, I realized that exactly cabbage soup, and not something else, only I cook...
At the same time, when I treated some of them to this “outlandish” dish, everyone really liked it...
In fact, as usual... the secret to making delicious cabbage soup- this is simplicity. It’s like this, you’ll probably ruin it if you start adding something... No cereals, extraneous seasonings, etc.
To prepare cabbage soup we will need:
— Meat for cabbage soup(pork on the bone; chicken leg; medium-fat lamb) quantity 200-300g per 2l pan. It is clear that the original Russian cabbage soup, which is cooked in the Urals, is prepared exclusively with lamb, and not with dubious broilers. But time dictates its own rules and conditions. I cook different, but equally EXCELLENT cabbage soup, both with lamb, pork and chicken.
— Sauerkraut for cabbage soup. Approximately, if you have cabbage sprayed into jars, then this is about 2 liters - 0.4-0.5 liters of cabbage. Those. if you placed yours tightly in three-liter jars, then this is 6-7 cabbage soup... One point: it is very advisable that when fermenting the cabbage, dry dill seeds are used, because they give a special aroma to the cabbage soup!
— Potatoes, 3-4 medium potatoes (boiled potatoes are a must).
— Onion – 1 medium onion.
- A little ground black pepper.
— A couple of bay leaves won’t make the cabbage soup any worse, but, in my opinion, they belong there!
So now the process of preparing Russian cabbage soup. The secret of the “number van” is to take a small saucepan or ladle, 1-1.5 liters in volume, and pour our pickled kaputa into it. Fill with water and cook separately!!! Trying to throw sauerkraut into a common pan, where cabbage soup is being cooked, until the potatoes are completely ready, it’s a failure as it is.
Cook the cabbage separately for at least an hour, or even two. Let the cabbage boil, and then simmer it over low heat. You may have to add a little water a couple of times, when what is there has evaporated, the cabbage has not yet released its juices sufficiently, and the water has already boiled away.
This is exactly how cabbage simmers during cooking cabbage soup in the oven, which now is the lot of only the most rural residents...
At the same time, in a 2-2.5 liter saucepan we begin to cook the meat. We salt it, lightly pepper it, and cook it to form a whiter or less saturated broth. It is for this reason that it is very good when there is a small fragment of bone in the meat!
When the meat is cooked well enough, a broth is obtained - we add medium-sized potatoes (as usual, for soup).
At the moment when the potatoes are cooked until fully cooked (this is important), we add sauerkraut, which has already been simmered for an hour and a half, to the main pan. Whether to pour out all the sour broth that comes from the cabbage is determined purely by taste. We added half the broth - it turned out not very sour, to your taste - add further until we get the desired acid.
Finely chop the onion and throw it into the cabbage soup, literally half a minute before removing from the heat. It is important here that the onion does not cook, but remains with its certain sharpness and pungency.
If it’s the season and there are greens available, then some finely chopped green onions won’t hurt.
All! This is the most simple and tasty recipe for Russian cabbage soup. Everything else is excess, if not to say from the evil one
From the author: Definitely, the craving for Russian cuisine has never been my strong point: familiar to the teeth and not at all outstanding, it only caused boredom. "
But gradually my attitude towards it began to change: it turned out that, not squeezed into the grip of ordinary cooking, it can surprise, and how, and classic, seemingly boring dishes, with a careful approach, can give a hundred points ahead to a lot of what they have to offer foreign cuisines. Classic Russian cabbage soup made from sauerkraut is one of my latest hobbies: a correctly selected and executed recipe does not make this dish more complicated, but at the same time it becomes fantastically tasty.
To prepare my cabbage soup, I covered myself with literature, using Pokhlebkin, Syrnikov, Molokhovets, Alexandrova-Ignatieva, so don’t be surprised if in some ways my recipe seems familiar to you, but in some ways you do it differently. Another point concerns potatoes: I like it without them in cabbage soup, but I made cabbage soup with potatoes to show what a contradictory nature I am - but you can safely go the other way and replace it with turnips, parsnips or kohlrabi, cut into strips. Russian cabbage soup made from sauerkraut
Ingredients6 servings
500 g sauerkraut
25 g butter
1 onion
1 carrot
2-3 potatoes
4 cloves garlic
several sprigs of dill
salt
for broth: 1 kg. beef ribs
2 l. water
1 onion
1 carrot
2 bay leaves
a few peas of allspice
Place the sauerkraut in a ceramic pot, add a couple of tablespoons of cabbage brine or water and a piece of butter. Close the pot with a lid, put it in the oven, preheat it to 190 degrees, then reduce the temperature to 120 degrees. Simmer the cabbage for 3 hours until deep golden brown, stirring occasionally and adding a little more water to the pot if necessary.
Cover the beef ribs with water, add a pinch of salt and place over medium heat. When the water boils, reduce the heat and begin to actively skim off the foam, and after the foam has subsided, add the coarsely chopped onion and carrot, bay leaf and allspice. Cover the pan loosely with a lid and cook the broth for about the same 3 hours as the cabbage will simmer. If you are used to cooking broth differently, you can do it your own way, and for beginners, I once wrote a super detailed article How to cook broth: a complete guide. 
Strain the broth, remove the meat from the bones and chop into small pieces. Add a finely chopped onion, carrots, cut into strips, diced potatoes into the pot and fill with broth (if you don’t have such a large pot, but have a couple of smaller pots, great, divide the ingredients approximately equally and cook in two pots, as I did I). Return the pot to the oven and leave it there for another 40 minutes, until the vegetables are tender, which can be checked with a fork. If necessary, adjust the cabbage soup for salt.
I will dwell on this issue in a little more detail.
Freshly fermented cabbage remains crunchy, holds its shape well, and still contains quite a lot of moisture. Over time, the water in it becomes less and less, and the salt in the same volume of cabbage becomes more and more, so well-fermented cabbage for cabbage soup is sometimes even washed so that their taste does not turn out to be too salty. As you can imagine, there are too many variables in this equation, and instead of adding salt to the cabbage, you may leave everything as is or even regret that you did not rinse the cabbage at the very beginning. To prevent this from happening, taste the cabbage before putting it in the pot and, if necessary, rinse with water. 
At the very end, add chopped meat, chopped garlic and dill to the pot of cabbage soup, return it to the oven and turn it off, leaving the cabbage soup in the cooling oven. Ideally, the cabbage soup should not be disturbed for some time, and when it has cooled down, take it out onto a balcony or loggia with a temperature below zero and leave for a day: light freezing will only benefit the cabbage soup; its taste will become deeper and richer. However, cabbage soup is, in any case, one of those soups that only becomes tastier over time, so don’t rush to eat it right away. And when you finally get ready to serve sauerkraut cabbage soup to your family, add sour cream and a little more fresh herbs. I won’t sit down at the table without buttering a couple of slices of Borodino or grain rye bread, but that’s a matter of personal preference.
Sauerkraut cabbage soup - it seems that traditional Russian cuisine is unthinkable without them, and how can you do without rich, wintery, aromatic cabbage soup with sauerkraut in the harsh winter? Although historically, sour cabbage soup was not called the first dish with cabbage, but a fizzy drink made from pickled pineapples. It’s hard to imagine, but the nobles of the times of Catherine II kept greenhouses in which they grew pineapples and fermented them directly in barrels. Hence the name of the drink, which even Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol used to talk about.
What about real cabbage soup? There was also sour cabbage soup made from sauerkraut, and their composition certainly included cabbage, meat or mushrooms, as well as brine and spices. Subsequently, potatoes were added to the cabbage soup to thicken it. But about all the recipes in order.
It’s worth preparing cabbage soup according to the classic recipe just to try what real Russian cabbage soup is like - stewed, filled with a special “shchi spirit” that permeated any Russian hut and was indestructible. Today we will prepare rich cabbage soup, or full cabbage soup, that is, with a full set of ingredients (empty cabbage soup made from cabbage and onions was called poor).
The rich were usually like this. Taken:
- beef (750 g);
- half a liter jar of sauerkraut;
- one large potato, carrot, turnip;
- a pair of onions;
- half a cup of salted chopped mushrooms and a few dried white mushrooms;
- heels of garlic cloves;
- parsley and celery root;
- parsley and dill seed or greens;
- laurel;
- half a glass of sour cream for whitening;
- a spoonful of cream, ghee and vegetable oil for frying;
- peppercorns.
Progress:
- Let the meat cook, adding roots and carrots.
- After an hour and a half, add salt to the broth, strain and remove the roots.
- Place sauerkraut in a clay pot, pour half a liter of boiling water into it and add butter. Cover with a lid and place in a medium-heat oven. The cabbage should become soft.
- Transfer the cabbage to the broth.
- Pour a little water into a saucepan, put the potatoes cut into quarters, mushrooms, and cook. When the water boils, remove the mushrooms, cool, cut into thin strips, and place again with the potatoes. Once cooked, add everything, including the mushroom broth, to the meat broth.
- Now everything is cooked together - cabbage, potatoes, broth and roots with finely chopped onion, which you also added to the other ingredients. Everything should boil for about 20 minutes.
- Only when the cabbage soup is removed from the heat, garlic and dill are added to it, and then, wrapped in something warm, the cabbage soup should be left to brew for at least half an hour.
- Serving in plates, season the cabbage soup with sour cream and salted chopped mushrooms.
Made with sauerkraut and mushrooms
Product set:
- a good piece of brisket from the edge - half a kilo;
- half a liter of cabbage;
- two carrots (for frying and for broth) and also onions;
- two large potatoes;
- 100 g fresh porcini mushrooms;
- a couple of fresh tomatoes;
- a couple of cloves of garlic;
- spices;
- butter 20 g;
- a little vegetable oil.
You can prepare cabbage soup from sauerkraut with meat and mushrooms like this:
- Boil beef broth; to do this, place a washed piece of meat in cold water, wait until it boils and skim off the foam. Then throw in some peppercorns, salt, onion and carrots. Cook, descaling, for two or one and a half hours, depending on the readiness of the meat. Important! If the cabbage is over-salted, salt the cabbage soup carefully.
- Meanwhile, simmer the cabbage in a frying pan, adding butter and a little water. This will take about twenty minutes.
- Take the boiled meat out of the pan and cut it. Strain the broth, removing the boiled vegetables. Load the cabbage into it and continue cooking. Then add the potatoes cut into cubes. Note! Potatoes cook in an acidic environment for a long time and remain uncooked. If you like smooth and uncooked pieces of potatoes, then send them to cook after the cabbage. But if you like grandma’s cabbage soup with mashed and loose potatoes, then first let the potatoes cook, then take out part of it and mash it, put it back in the cabbage soup. And then add cabbage there.
- While the cabbage is cooking, fry the mushrooms in oil, fry the chopped onion and grated carrots separately.
- Place everything in a saucepan and let it simmer for a while. Before the end of cooking, add bay leaf and chopped garlic. Everything will boil - and turn it off. The cabbage soup is ready. Let it sit for a while, until it finishes cooking, then pour it into plates and add herbs.
Lenten cabbage soup from sauerkraut
For lean cabbage soup, it is important to figure out how to thicken it and make it more satisfying. Previously, buckwheat and mushrooms were added to such cabbage soup. Today, most often, potatoes or, less commonly, flour sautéed in vegetable oil act as a thickener.
The composition of the products is simple and minimal:
- one large onion and one carrot each;
- 300 g sauerkraut;
- four large potatoes;
- spices.
To make lean cabbage soup tasty, it is very important to add more potatoes. It gives density, satiety, and ties all other components into a single whole. The potatoes should be well boiled. Very often, housewives boil whole potatoes, take them out and pound them, and put them back into the cabbage soup.
Preparing lean cabbage soup. Boil the potatoes in 2.5 liters of boiling water, then either take them out and mash them, or initially cut them into strips and don’t pound them (this is a matter of taste!). Next, put the cabbage in the cabbage soup.
While it is cooking, fry diced onion and grated carrots in a frying pan in oil. We recommend using a grater with small holes for carrots, it will be tastier. Place this frying into the cabbage soup.
If the cabbage is too sour, rinse it with cold water before adding. If, on the contrary, there is not enough acid in the cabbage soup, add a little brine. In general, go by taste.
Sour cabbage soup with sauerkraut and stewed meat
Very tasty and rich cabbage soup is made with stew. Making them couldn’t be easier: first cook regular lean cabbage soup, as stated in the previous recipe, and before the end of cooking, open a can of stew and put the contents into the prepared cabbage soup. Boil everything together a little and serve with herbs and sour cream.
With pork
Cabbage soup with sauerkraut goes well with pork broth. The proportions of the products may be the same, but a fatty piece of pork is used. Not everyone likes the aroma of pork broth, so to get rid of that pork smell, you need to fry coarsely chopped carrots and onions in a dry frying pan. Then put the meat in three liters of water, when it boils, remove the foam, and then put vegetables, salt and pepper into the water. After boiling the broth for an hour, strain it, remove everything unnecessary. Remove the meat too.
Fry the second carrot and onion, as well as the potatoes cut into bars, lightly in oil. Place in a saucepan and boil for ten minutes.
Add cabbage. Boil for another ten minutes and leave to steep. Slice the meat and place on plates when serving.
Sauerkraut and chicken cabbage soup
Boil the chicken, making a clear broth. Remove the meat. Add a couple of potatoes, cut into strips, into the broth. Potatoes cook quickly, so we cook the cabbage, add it to the broth after about five minutes, and while the cabbage is cooking, fry it in vegetable oil, add a little onion and carrots. If you have bell pepper, then add that too, as well as finely chopped tomato. Place the sautéed vegetables in a pan with cabbage soup, add salt, let it boil, and finally add bay leaf and pepper.
Unique and amazing Russian cabbage soup! In our family, this recipe is passed down from generation to generation. Among my friends, no one has tried this before, but everyone, without exception, likes cabbage soup after taking the sample.
Gray cabbage soup is my husband's favorite dish since childhood. I heard about them almost from the first day we met. They are called so because they are not cooked from white cabbage, but from the coarse and dryish, really greenish-gray outer leaves of the cabbage, which are usually torn off and thrown away in the garden, fermented in a special way.
According to family legend, his grandmother, Baba Katya, once prepared this cabbage soup absolutely incomparably. Naturally, in a pot and in a Russian oven.
My husband simply describes how there was a ghostly spirit in the hut: “Not sauerkraut, but something so sweet that immediately caused hunger pangs to begin. The most precise description of this incomparable aroma is in Bunin’s “Dark Alleys”: “Behind the stove damper there was a sweet smell of cabbage soup - boiled cabbage, beef and bay leaves.” That's right, that's sweet."
Can you imagine, he memorized this: how can you forget this? “Yes...I was terribly hungry, but Grandma Katya was in no hurry. She left the pot of cabbage soup to finish in the stove, and she sat down to sort out the blueberries. If some berries fell on the floor, she collected them with a broom and put them in a bowl of jam, saying: “We walk ourselves.” So this saying remained in our family. And I was ready to eat gray cabbage soup even every day.”
In the first year of marriage, I myself tried these cabbage soup made by Baba Ali. They surprised me very much. If they hadn't told me that they were made from sauerkraut, I would never have thought about it. Is it even cabbage? It is somewhat similar to sorrel, but the leaves are much denser. The taste is sour, but not simple, but highly enriched by the whole range of dense broth in which a good piece of meat, bones, and mushrooms were cooked.
And indeed, a fantastic aroma: as if they were turning up rotten cut grass with a rake, which had been lying in the sun... Then I realized that this natural spirit is obtained from the combination of meat flesh and herbal leaven with simple, clear spices - bay leaf and allspice black peppercorns, which simmered in a saucepan, and with fresh dill and garlic placed directly on the plate. These few and very specific seasonings perfectly highlight the taste of quality country products.
And one more amazing property of gray cabbage soup is that they give a charge of some kind of crazy thermal energy. They say that Grandfather Dyusha, Baba Katya’s husband, after slurping on these very cheeks, sat for a long time, sucking on a sugar bone and wiping away the sweat that was rolling from his forehead. Yes, I myself felt a pleasant warmth rising from within, and the fatigue was gone. Of course, I immediately took the recipe from Baba Ali, but then I somehow got overwhelmed and forgot about it. I first decided to cook them just five years ago.
Everything turned out to be difficult. I walked around two markets - Rizhsky and Dorogomilovsky, - I interviewed everyone selling cabbage - fresh and pickled - no one had any trace of gray cabbage leaves. Two aunts said that they had heard about gray cabbage soup from their grandmothers, but no one knew how to ferment, much less cook, these leaves. Lyuba from Rizhsky, from whom I have been buying pickles for many years, remembers eating them as a child, and a couple of days later she brought me a whole bag of the treasured product, which no one needed in her house and was lying around in my mother’s garden. She gave it away free of charge, that is, for nothing.
I fermented the leaves myself. They used to do this. The leaves were washed, chopped like cabbage soup, and poured with boiling water to soften them. Then the cooled cabbage was squeezed out, salted well, some coarsely grated carrots were added and put in a bucket, sprinkled with rye flour. It was this rye leaven that imbued the leaves with an amazing sweet and sour spirit. But where could I get rye flour? Baba Alya advised to buy the simplest black bread, cut off the crusts, wrap them in pieces of gauze and put them on the cabbage. And then everything is as usual when fermenting: pour warm boiled water over the cabbage, cover with a plate, put a weight on it and put it under pressure for five days. Several times during this time I mixed the cabbage, and then threw out the peels, put them in bags - 700 grams each (this is enough for a three-liter pan) and put them in the freezer. This is exactly how the basis for gray cabbage soup was always stored, in the cold, in glaciers and cellars.
I cooked cabbage soup on Saturday. I stocked up in advance on a kilogram piece of juicy beef with a solid bone and bought five heels of excellent porcini mushrooms. I set the meat to cook in the morning - it barely gurgled for a long time with a large onion, carrots and celery and parsley roots. In the meantime, I took out a bag of cabbage, dumped it into a clay pot with two tablespoons of butter, poured a couple of glasses of boiling water and put it in a slightly heated oven - up to 60-80 degrees (after all, all these newfangled low-temperature technologies of ours simply imitate the ancient simmering in the oven ).
A little over an hour passed and I threw out all the vegetables from the broth, but dumped the contents of the clay pot into it. Now it was possible to pepper and add a little salt. While the meat was rubbing against the leaves, I peeled two potatoes, cut them into quarters and set them to cook along with the mushrooms. When the potatoes are cooked, Baba Alya taught, they need to be taken out and crushed until almost pureed. It turns out that in an acidic environment, potato pieces become woody and spoil the whole taste. And puree is needed to thicken the broth.
About 15-20 minutes before removing the cabbage soup from the heat, I coarsely chopped the cooked mushrooms and put them into the pan along with the broth, mashed potatoes and new, now finely chopped onions and roots and parsley. It is very important to cook the meat for a long time over low heat and put the onions and roots twice: first in the broth, and then in the almost finished cabbage soup - then they become strong and aromatic.
When everything was bubbling on the stove, I really really wanted to eat, but I had to put the pan in the warm oven for at least half an hour (or better yet, longer). And here's another thing. It is better not to season such cabbage soup with sour cream alone - they do not need extra acid. Mix sour cream well with cream, dill and a crushed clove of garlic - simply fabulous!
I was very worried whether my husband would like my cabbage soup. And he ate and didn’t say anything. I looked at the cabbage soup and thought that they weren’t so gray. Rather, they are swamp green and even with cheerful red spots on mushroom caps - reminiscent of the color of the Uloma forest with its dark tall ship pines.
Finally, he said that almost everything was great, but the mushrooms were too soft: “They should crunch a little.” You probably soaked them too long.” God, what a mistake! In the recipe that I copied from Baba Ali’s notebook, there was the word “mushrooms,” but I forgot to note that we were talking about dried ones.
Even now I remember our faces: they were sweating from the warm, life-giving power of the soul.
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