I love to cook BORSCH because it is always a creativity. This time I cooked by the simple basis recipe. But you can add, for exhample, beans, browned eggplant, green beans, bell pepper. You can use any spices to your taste. Also you can cook it on a meat broth, or make a vegetarian soup as I did.
For my recipe I took:
potatoes
cabbage
carrot
onion
homemade canned tomato
garlic, hot peppers
homemade pickled beets
proportion as on the left photo
Wash and clean all the vegetables.
Slice all the vegetables. Put potatoes and cabbage in a pan with, boiling on a medium fire, water.
Carrots, onions, tomatoes saute in sunflower or other vegetable oil
Add spices. I had the garlic, allspice, cloves, bay leaf, rosemary, caraway, chilli, salt, sugar. All this I added for my own taste, you can use yours. I add spices in ~ 5min before everything is ready.
When everything was ready, I turned off the fire under the pan and then added the marinated beets and beet marinade. Because of this, borsch has a beautiful burgundy color ().
In addition, in a beet marinate we have vinegar, which will give piquant acidity and sharpness. Add marinated beets convenient because it already cooked. The secret is that if you add beets in boiling water, borsch will change it's color from a beautiful burgundy to pale pink.