Borscht SoupBread
Short Rib Borscht Focaccia Deep roasted beet stock folded into an 83% hydration sourdough focaccia, topped with braised short rib, caramelized sauerkraut cabbage, dill crème fraîche, and horseradish.
There’s a category of cooking idea that sounds wrong on paper and right in your gut. This is one of them.
Borscht is one of the most deeply satisfying things you can eat — earthy, acidic, sweet from the beets, rich from the beef, and finished with something cold and creamy that cuts through all of it. It is soup in its most complete form. And focaccia, when made well, is bread in its most relaxed form — open-crumbed, olive-oil-soaked, slightly crisp on the bottom and pillowy through the middle. The question that started this recipe was simple: what happens if you make one out of the other?
The answer, after a lot of testing, is this. A focaccia that doesn’t just sit next to a bowl of borscht — it is the borscht. The dough is hydrated with concentrated roasted beet stock. The fat comes from the short rib braising liquid. The toppings are the soup: shredded short rib, caramelized cabbage, diced beets, fresh dill. And the soup itself — built from the same stock and the same vegetable purée — gets finished separately and served alongside.
The technical challenge is real. Soup, if you just dump it into dough, destroys gluten development. The fat, the acid, the vegetable fibers all interfere with structure. So instead of using the soup, you build a clarified, concentrated beet broth specifically engineered to hydrate dough — clean enough to ferment cleanly, flavorful enough that you taste borscht in every bite.
This is a weekend project. It is not quick. It rewards patience, a decent sourdough starter, and a willingness to let a process run its full course. But when you pull this out of the oven — that deep burgundy crust, the short rib catching and crisping at the edges, the smell of dill and beet and browned fat filling the kitchen — it will feel like something you invented. Because you did.
