I promised a few weeks ago a recipe for the famous Polish sour soup, żurek. It’s a staple Polish dish and in recent years it has enjoyed a bit of a revival – when you go to Poland, some places will serve żurek in a loaf of bread (see the tumbnail photo above).
I recently made it for my friends, who’d never experienced żurek in their lives. Wasn’t quite sure whether they’d enjoy it as I remember I used to hate it as a kid. Just because it was sour. (I recently came to realise I used to hate many foods I now adore.)
But my biggest problem was how to actually make the base for the soup, called the kwas. It’s quite simple – you get some rye flour, add water, lots and lots of garlic and spices and let it ferment in a ceramic pot for a few days. But if you haven’t done it before, it sounds a bit scary. So I didn’t want to risk it and went for the easy option – a jar of the fermented stuff from the Polish shop (see the pic below). Delia Smith would be proud of my sneaky cheating technique.
So here are the ingredients (serves 4):
- 400-500g of the fermented stuff (aka kwas or zakwas)
- 200g of nice smoked sausage, diced
- 150g of smoked bacon
- 1 onion
- 10-15 mushrooms, sliced
- 250ml sour cream
- 4 eggs (1 per person)
- 2 diced carrots
- 2 bay leaves
- salt, pepper, dried mixed herbs
Now, what follows is my version of the soup. There will be millions of variations, depending on the region, taste, the choice of ingredients. The most important bit is zakwas. It gives the soup its flavour.
Boil approximately 1.5 litres of vegetable stock with a couple of bay leaves and the carrots. Slice your smoked sausage (I used Polish wiejska kiełbasa) then dice the onion and the bacon. Fry them together until the bacon and the sausage are slightly golden.
Then add the mushrooms and simmer for 3-5 minutes until the mushrooms have browned too.
Once it’s done, add the sausage, onion, bacon and mushroom to your stock, then pour in the kwas. Stir well until all the kwas has dissolved. At this stage season the soup with some salt, pepper and some dried mixed herbs.
Let it simmer nicely for 20 minutes.
Hard boil one egg per person. Cut it in half and put the two halves in a soup bowl. Add some cream to your soup to make it thicker (I didn’t, I still think cream is fully optional here) and pour the soup over the egg. Voila! It’s ready! You can serve the soup with some sliced bread, but if you use a lot of sausage (like I did), the soup on its own will be quite filling.
Now, I did intend to take a picture of the final product too, but I was so excited about my first ever żurek in the UK, I forgot to do so. Sorry. But as you can see from the picture below, everyone enjoyed the soup a lot.
TIP: Give your soup time to ‘mature’ – I made mine 24 hours before it was served. It was much nicer as all the sour, herby and smoky flavours had enough time to mix well together.
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