polish easter soup for the intrepid

My grandma’s Easter soup is one of the only things I like about Easter.  The recycler in me loves the very concept of this soup, described most scornfully by a hater here.  (To whom I say: you should have had my great-grandma’s potato-ketchup soup if you want to thumb your nose at poverty cooking, yo.) Polish Easter Soup, also called zhurek or white borsch, utilizes the broth made by cooking the Easter kielbasa, leftover ham and sausage, a few dried mushrooms, leftover hardboiled eggs, whey that was probably hanging around as a by-product of Farmer cheese-making (there’s your answer, Polish Easter Soup-hater!), and the leftover liquid from a rye sourdough starter.  The soup is thickened with sour cream blended with a bit of flour.

My grandma’s recipe

I’ve always liked it in its simplest form, but this year I tried to bump up the flavor with Sweet Briar Farms spicy beer sausage (since I couldn’t find natural kielbasa), Russian fingerling potatoes, and fresh maitake mushrooms sauteed with bacon and the aforementioned beer sausage.  I used a Guatemalan crema for the sour cream, and added some Tule Lake fresh horseradish and a splash of vinegar to balance the flavors.  The hardboiled egg garnish was greenified by some garden chives, and each bowl of soup contained a dollop of additional horseradish.

But if this doesn’t sound like your thing, I hope you hunted up some raw, fresh Easter Egg radishes as beautiful as these.