I can't believe it hasn't listed the Polish "żur" (or "żurek"). It is a soup made of soured rye flour, served in a bread bowl. Utterly delicious. For me it is, by far, the best traditional Polish dish (and soup).
Came here to post the same thing. Żurek is phenomenal and Polish cuisine is among the best, and most underrated.
Recipes online say you need to make a fermented starter liquid called zakwas, which is allegedly sold pre-made in Polish grocery stores. But I could not find it for sale online. There are instant żurek mixes on Amazon, though, and a few packets are now on their way.
> Recipes online say you need to make a fermented starter liquid called zakwas, which is allegedly sold pre-made in Polish grocery stores. But I could not find it for sale online.
In what part of the world are you in? Changes are there is a at least on Polish deli around you.
Polish cuisine really is amazing. My favorite cold summer soup is Chłodnik, a bright pink creamy beet soup with farm-fresh hard boiled eggs and young potatoes on the side. Borowikowa is a hot mushroom soup made from wild Porcini mushrooms gathered in the fall mushroom-hunting season with an incredibly rich taste.
The Poles take ingredient quality very seriously and have so many awesome food traditions, plus are getting much better at reproducing other culture's cuisines, I think mainly due to open EU borders giving a lot of restaurateurs working experience outside the country.
Well, this atlas registers it as a Lithuanian dish šaltibarščiai, much to dismay of Polish who believe it's their chłodnik, and Belarusians who are certain it's their chaładnik.
With a few well-known* exceptions it's a very risky idea to attribute any particular dish to a particular country. I'm from Eastern Europe, and can say almost any attribution can and will be disputed here :-) And situation can be farther complicated by the fact that same names are often used for different dishes.
* - And even those are disputed from time to time.
Well I think we could make a list kind of "Falsehoods people believe about culinary".
A dish with the same name can also mean different things in different names. Açorda in Portugal, always has bread, but depending on where in Portugal you are can mean a soup that you pour over a piece of bread or smashed bread with shrimps
I believe it's just a classification difference. In some cultures a soup is soup when it's liquid. A gravy-style dish can exist, no problem, but will not be recognized as soup then.
Missing lots of very basic but good soups (then again, the search doesn't work well, returning "categories", "events" and "restaurants" rather than soups by keyword):
In Romania, we make a clear distinction between Supa, Ciorba and Bors.
Supa (Soup) is the un-soured base, Ciorba is sour (usually soured with lemon) and Bors (Borscht) is soured with an wheat bran based fermented liquid by the same name. :)
Ciorba arrived on the table of the Romanians on a historical whim, being boiled first in the kettles and boilers of the Sipahi troops of the Ottoman Empire. It was so closely related to the image of the troops of the Ottoman military that the heads of the regiments of the Sipahi were known as "ciorbagii", perhaps because by their tent was always near the canteen, where the best tripe or ram soups were made, flavoured with leaves of mint, added vegetables, pepper and for ornament, parsley.
Tracing the name you can observe with precision the route of the Ottoman conquests. Greeks call it τσορβάς (ţorbas), Bulgarians cook tchorba, a.s.o. I asked some of my Hungarian colleagues if they also have the word in their language and they do... but only designating a single, special type of soup: tripe (in my opinion the quintesence of çorba). The regular word for soup in Hungarian is "leves" and being weirdos, they have another special word for cabbage soup: "lucskos".
Additionally, in Poland, by my count there're at least four different soups made from beetroot - barszcz czerwony (eaten traditionally with "uszka" dumplings, without sour cream), barszcz ukrainski (eaten with vegetables and beans), chlodnik (cold soup, eaten with cream) and another barszcz czerwony (hot soup, eaten with cream). Poland has LOTS of soups
Supa has western European etymology, and chorba was the word brought by the Ottomans. Not sure about Romania, but throughout the Balkans the difference in meaning is mostly in the connotation of a degree of sophistication (supa:chorba is as city:village).
It's probably hard to find, depending on where you live.
I'd personally recommend the "ciorba de perisoare" (soup with meatballs) "ciorba de fasole cu afumatura" (bean soup with pork) and "ciorba de burta" (if you're willing to have an open mind when trying it, the taste is very good; it's tripe soup).
Afaik there are at least dozen or two different recipes of borscht in Eastern Europe. In fact, just a map of them and spellings of ‘borschtsch’ would make for an interesting resource.
BTW, borscht was originally made with hogweed, which is where the name comes from. The beetroots variant is a later development, though it has now practically replaced the original.
This video, despite the annoying voice, describes it and its ingredients, I think it should be easy enough to follow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSnXUxXC0_E (it's actually "ciorba de stevie" but it's basically the same thing)
Nice idea, but the implementation is not great: many places have multiple soups superimposed, but only one is even shown if you click and there's no way to "expand" a cluster. If you want the full list for a country, you need to browse the pictures by location.
The iconography is a bit variable. London is represented by the arms of the Greater London Council, which were granted in 1966, and which was abolished in 1986.
I’m not sure many people in Portugal would call “açorda" a soup. The most common variety has the consistency of mashed potatoes and is either a course in itself (when mixed with prawns, for example) or used as a side for meat.
Oh! I thought it would be a map in culinary space of soup varieties. So if wanted a sour winter soup without meat, I'd find a cluster of those somewhere in a 3D space...
This is amazing!! Exactly the kind of thing i've been looking for to find new regional dishes. But like others mentioned, it's lacking a lot of entries. Does anyone know how to submit dishes?
Here you can read more about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Slavic_fermented_cereal_s...
Edit: I found it on their website, but it's missing on the map: https://www.tasteatlas.com/zurek
Edit2: Thanks for pointing out that I can click on the number directly. Not too intuitive, but zurek is there!