Borş from scratch
Fermented wheat bran juice used in Romanian ciorbă (sour soup) or drunk as a hangover cure. This recipe will make a batch when starting from nothing; subsequent batches will use a starter made from the remains of this one.
Servings: 0
Ingredients
- 2 cups wheat bran
- 1 cup cornmeal
- 3-4 slices black bread (rye or pumpernickel) replace with huşte if available (see note)
- 5-6 tart cherry or other fruit leaves optional
- cormeal and wheat flour as needed to make huşte
Instructions
- Rinse wheat bran with cool water then strain and put into a large jar.
- Add cornmeal to jar and fill with 2 quarts of warm water. Stir to hydrate all the dry ingredients.
- Add pieces of black bread to the mixture.
- Place fruit leaves into the jar, if using.
- Put lid on the jar and set on your counter where you will see it. Periodically give the contents a stir.
- The next day check that the liquid is beginning to bubble. When you see fermentation activity you can strain out the bread pieces and fruit leaves.
- Continue to stir contents of the jar periodically for two more days. After the third day, the borş should smell a little like pickles, perhaps faintly unpleasant, but it should not smell bad.
- Pour the borş into bottles or jars for storage, filtering out the solids in the process. Reserve the solids to make a borş starter (called huşte) for use next time.
- Press as much liquid out of the reserved solids and put into a mixing bowl.
- Add equal amounts of cornmeal and wheat flour to dry out the mixture. Form into small patties and let dry out completely for several hours on a sheet pan.
- When the patties are completely dry, put them in zip top bags and store in the freezer to use in making your next borş. When making this recipe with starter, replace the black bread pieces with a couple patties of huşte starter.
Notes
Huşte is a dry starter for making borş. Once you make a batch of borş from scratch the first time, dry the remaining solids and save for use in your next batch. After a couple days if the mixture smells very unpleasant it may be contaminated with the wrong kind of bacteria. Throw it out and start again.
