Why hello there! Welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, and holy crap, are we late this week. The range of issues that delayed us included mental misfires, medical scares, and broken sleep schedules, but we’re HERE NOW, with a soup that we’re going to make MUCH harder than it has to be, for jokes only I really understand. For those of you who spit on history, you can click this link to get the recipe. For everyone else, let’s cover 500 years of culinary history in one country, 103 years of culinary history in ANOTHER country, at least 2 languages, and a computer error on our way to soup that can be made with only 2 steps.

A Spark from a Failing Machine

So, today’s post is a Patreon Sponsored post, which is one of the reasons I was so dedicated to getting it done instead of delaying it. And it was one that suddenly jumped to my attention because of what I can only assume was a technical glitch. You may recall that last week we had some technical issues, that were the result of previous technical issues in December. To really condense the story: we had problems with Bluehost back in December, and while working out the technical details, realized that we don’t need to pay for all the services we have been paying them for. We asked to lower our service, they said sure, and then, due to some kind of misfiling on their end, their servers read that as “suspend the service” a week ago, so for a couple hours we didn’t own our website anymore. We sorted it all out, but after doing so, something funny happened.

Before I start uploading any post to the site, I check our analytics to see if the previous week’s posts are doing well, if our traffic is up or down, etc. We average in the high teens to low twenties for an average day, which is up from previous years.

The day our service came back, we got 103 views. Of which, 54 of them were people reading our Instant Pot Primer Quick Tip.

Meaning I literally went from “0 to 100” real quick once the error was resolved.

We assume that was a technical glitch, one person’s device connecting over and over for whatever reason (held down refresh button, reading on a phone on a bus and connecting to different wi-fis, whatever). And while we were laughing about it, I realized it was also an opportunity. See, as I mentioned, our Patron had asked us to handle Hong Kong Borscht, which does have an “Instant-Pot” recipe. The quotes there are because, as noted IN the primer, “Instant-Pot” is just the famous brand name of a type of multicooker. But people don’t GOOGLE Multicooker, they google Instant-Pot, so that’s what people put in, because traffic is how websites live.

That red line is searches for Multicooker, while the Blue line is Instant Pot.
Also, this is a surprising number of graphs for a post about soup.

So I could take a Patron request for a weird soup with a wild history, tie it to increased internet searches, AND reference weird technical details? That’s like my Catnip. I was in. So, what exactly are we making?

Breaking Down The Borscht

Here’s where one of my first failures comes in: I was supposed to cover NORMAL borscht before this, but ended up leaving the beets too long on the counter, and made the Vegan Tomato Nduja instead. So now I have to cover a little more ground than I intended with this one. AHEM.

Borscht is a sour soup derived from Slavs in north Eastern Europe, originally connected with the regions now called Poland and the Ukraine. It was originally made with fermented hogsweed. It was seen as a folk medicine for hangovers, sore throats, and many other maladies.

Here’s some more Russian Folk Medicine. Don’t eat it it, very poisonous.

Eventually, this intermingled with traditions of pickling beets for similar flavors and purposes, and the two were merged, so now the common idea of a borscht is of a sour soup, likely made with beetroot for red color, and non-beetroot borschts will frequently classify themselves by color (white, green, etc).

The recipe itself is hugely variable, as you can have vegetarian, or even vegan borschts, but these are typically considered higher end summer dishes in the regions that make borscht most often. Most borschts include, at the least, meat-based broths, if not actual meat. The original recipes were supposedly mixtures of the aforementioned hogsweeds and beef.

All of this unfolded over centuries, with lots of zigs and zags. By the end of the 19th century, tomatoes had actually started replacing beet sour (fermented beet juice) as the acidic component of the soup in the Ukraine, while the beets themselves were retained mostly for the bold color they included.

The traditional use of Beet Juice, weirdly.
Especially since Beets weren’t originally red.

While this was happening, the dish was also spreading. Escoffier, the “King of Chefs” who we’ve discussed before, became fascinated with the deep-red color of Borscht, and brought it to the tables of high French cuisine. This actually served as the first way that Borscht became accepted in Europe: Russian emperors would employ French chefs, who would then learn to make borscht, and then serve it back in Western Europe as “soups from the Emperor’s table”.

And then history made things more complicated.

Suddenly Stalin

So, the Slavic soup of Borscht is well-established by the start of the 1900’s. It’s popular with the nobility, it’s popular with the peasantry, and everyone liked it. What everyone did NOT particularly like in early 1900’s Russia was the political direction of 1900’s Russia. The Tzar was unpopular, the wars didn’t go so great, this idea called Communism was catching on, and eventually this all resulted in “The Russian Revolution.”

The worst of the Dance Dance games, honestly.

I put quotes around that because history actually tends to clump two different revolutions, and a couple Civil Wars, all into the idea of the Russian Revolution, taking about 6 years. We don’t have time to unpack all of it, but basically: the Tsar pisses off everyone, so two groups grab power at the same time in February 1917 (which was actually March, but Imperial Russia had refused to adopt the Gregorian calendar, and was still in February , the Duma (a sort of Congress/Parliament) and the Soviet, a worker’s collective. They depose the Tsar, and strike a quasi-alliance quasi-cold war against each other. Lenin comes back, whips up the Soviets, things get really messy, and by October the Soviets go “you know what? I don’t think we need you assholes” to the Duma, and another war picks up between the “Reds” (pro-Soviet Russians) and “Whites” (the Pro monarchy/pro-Duma, classical liberal forces). EVENTUALLY the Soviets win, rename Russia the USSR, and name themselves the Communist party.

So a LOT of “White Russians” end up bailing, because, you know, when you lose a Civil War, it doesn’t tend to go well for your side afterwards. (The one notable exception being the American Civil War, where through Andrew “Widely Considered the Worst President of All Time” Johnson, and Reconstruction, the South had a pretty solid rebound afterward.) So they bailed to Europe and/or China.

And the ones who went to China had a particularly tragic time of it, because they left Russia as late as 1923 or so…only for China to fall into a Civil War between ITS Communist Party and its leading party in 1927. Also, China recognized the USSR in 1924, which rendered the White Russian immigrants stateless: they claimed to come from Russia, which didn’t legally exist anymore.

“Didn’t there used to be a country here?”
”You ask a lot of questions for someone who doesn’t want to get shot.”

This, combined with Japanese invasions of China during The Sino-Japanese War of 1937, led to a lot of shuffling around of Russian immigrants. Weirdly, it didn’t tend to affect them as badly as you might fear: They were stateless foreigners, so they weren’t put into Concentration camps as some others were, but that same lack of background made them untrusted, and forced them to move often, with many Russians ending up in Taiwan and Hong Kong, since those were two Chinese territories that weren’t under communist control, and therefore wouldn’t send them back to the USSR.

And these Russians did what any displaced immigrant populace in the modern era does: they found odd jobs based on their foreign nature, one of which is almost always restaurants. Restaurants let them serve their own displaced communities food that at least resembled what they remembered from home, while also giving their new culture a way to understand and connect with them, if in a somewhat twisted/patronizing way.

Orange (Peel) Chicken for example, is really just like, a variation of General Tso’s Chicken, which is a Taiwanese dish.
So imagine if China kept saying they loved American food, and their example was “Chalupas”.

So, in Hong Kong and Taiwan, these Russian cooks made a new version of borscht. The lack of beets in subtropical China meant they had to rely on tomatoes even more for color and acidity. They used red cabbage to get SOME of the color back, and ended up with spare beef cuts like the shank or oxtail as the go-to ingredient. The soup got lighter, sweeter, and less sour.

And these chefs trained Chinese apprentices, who went out and made the soup the way they learned it. And now, if you enter a “Western” restaurant in Hong Kong, you’re almost always going to be offered a soup, and one of the primary choices will almost always be “lousong”, their name for Borscht. Lousong, by the way, is a transliteration of “Russian”, and pronounced close to “lu-son”.

And it’s this ubiquity that drew it to my Patron’s attention, who I will admit is my mother. During her ongoing months-long binge of Asian dramas, she noticed that people kept ordering Borscht in the subtitles, and that it didn’t look anything like the borscht she was aware of. So she used her position as a Patron of the site to force me into making the dish so she could try it. Why she would do that instead of just, you know, voicing opinions when I ask what we want to eat this month, I don’t know, but trying to analyze O’Guin thinking is messy business.

The madness I write as placeholders when building Trivia lists is a prime example of this.

So that’s the name and history, how do you make it?

The Easy Way, and the Hard Way

Now, this is where I ran into a rip-roaring host of difficulties: Firstly, because like all great creators I was blazing my own trail. By which I mean I was taking two different recipes and smushing them together. Secondly, because the recipe I had didn’t make much sense. And thirdly, because my local butcher forced me to work with an old enemy.

The first one we’ll get into more, but it’s the second and third point that really stumped me. See, I had two prominent recipes I was synthesizing for the dish: one that used beef bones and chuck beef, but wasn’t pressure cooked, and one that was pressure cooked, and used Beef shank. And that made sense, in theory: Beef shank is a relatively tough cut, full of collagen and bone, suited to low and slow cooking. Obviously, the idea is that by putting it in a pressure cooker, you shorten that low and slow cooking time. All of this was perfectly reasonable. What wasn’t reasonable was the instruction in the recipe to cut up the beef shank into small pieces BEFORE cooking. That implies a boneless beef shank, and a loss of collagen and flavor. Not that it mattered, because nowhere in my town was SELLING beef shank, so instead, I had to go with the standard shank replacement.

Pig Spines?

That is oxtail, and it’s very similar to beef shank in many respects. It is also a meat that I have only been called on to cook once before, and failed at said task miserably. I attempted to slow-cook them in the oven for 4 hours to be fall-apart tender, and ended up with them cooking for six hours, and somehow still not tender. But, I figured that the pressure cooker might bridge the gap between us. So I did NOT cut the oxtail into small pieces before cooking.

Now, depending on how you want to handle this, there are two possible approaches. The first is: Put all the ingredients in the multi-cooker, turn it on, and walk away. That’s the Easy way. The second is “sear the meat beforehand, deglaze with the veg, dump everything in the pot, and then turn it on and walk away.” That’s the “hard” way. And I picked that, if only so I could have more visuals as I worked.

So I grabbed my assortment of vegetables: red potatoes, tomatoes, celery, half a cabbage, just a standard mélange of soup veg, and chopped them up.

Chunky Soup means something different for me.

Then I forgot how to set things, and fiddled around for like, 15 minutes searing my ox tail. (I kept setting the sauté function for a 5 minute timer, so it would heat up, work for five minutes, then shut itself off.) That done, I tossed in the sliced onion to do the initial work of deglazing the pan. Then add in the carrots and celery, and then the tomatoes, and…something doesn’t feel right. It all looks fine, but something feels off. Anyway, once that’s all done, you add the oxtail back in, along with the potatoes and a quart of beef broth, and…Oh. Here’s the problem.

We made soup?

That may look perfectly fine to you, but that’s because you DON’T see two things: first is the “Maximum fill line”, which is now submerged under the broth, and the second thing is the half of a cabbage not yet put into the pot.

First you didn’t, now you do.
That’s the anti-magician’s way.
Also called “science”

As such, this will NOT fit in a 4 quart multicooker. Luckily, my family are perennially maximalists, and therefore in addition to our 4 quart multicooker, we have an 8 quart one.The downside is that, since my family are also perennial hoarders, the 8 quart pressure cooker has never been used, so we have to wash it, learn it, and get it set up, before getting to play the fun game of “pouring a hot pot of 4 quarts of soup into an 8 quart pot that will spin freely if you try and rest any directional force on it.” There are no pictures of this process because I was using the Royal We earlier, and did the cleaning, learning and set-up on my own.

I suppose the “we” could have been me and my robot buds.

Once it was IN the big pot, it was a simple matter of pressure cooking at 30 minutes. This might ALSO be a mistake: many other recipes I’ve checked since I made the dish indicate that the potatoes only want to pressure cook for 15 minutes while the other components can go longer. One recipe I saw cooked everything except the potatoes for 45 minutes, before adding the potatoes and cooking an additional 15, for 1 hours of total pressure cooking for the meat and veg. My original recipe only called for 15 minutes of pressure cooking TOTAL, which I felt couldn’t be right, and increased to 30. Did it ruin everything?

Pictures of soup aren’t visually distinct, Jon. We don’t know if this is a win or a loss.

After pressure cooking, the recipe I had called for a re-seasoning of the soup, the addition of some acid and funk (in the form of Worcestershire sauce), and bringing to an boil with the lid off to condense the soup slightly. At which point I had to leave, because the process had taken about 15 minutes longer than anticipated, meaning I had to leave at that moment for rehearsal.

My mother and Nathan ate the soup that night, and the reviews were…fine. The Oxtail is almost exactly as firm and unyielding as my first encounter with it, so my mother had to personally pull meat off of it to get it integrated into the rest of the soup.

Nate gave the soup a functional 5/10, with the review that “it existed”. He had no COMPLAINTS with it, he simply didn’t have much praise for it.

I didn’t eat any until we returned to the soup for tonight’s dinner, reheating the mix.

Seen here, mushier than it was before.

And…Nate’s not wrong. Structurally, the vegetables are very tender, the potatoes have kind of dissolved. The dish is warm and comforting, but in a slightly alien way. Like, eating the broth and veggies, I felt like I was consuming the generic idea of soup. It was warm, comforting, easy to eat, not particularly salty, acidic, or spicy. It didn’t stand out as amazing, but it certainly wasn’t bad.

The oxtail was a little weird, since it was texturally a little firmer than, say, pot roast. I think if/when I revisit the recipe, I’m going to try it with either softer meat, or a longer cooking time. I actually debated using short rib as the meat this time, but decided the oxtail would be quicker to thaw. Overall…I guess I can say “try it if you’re interested”. The soup is, again, perfectly serviceable. And I bet it would be roughly as serviceable, if less soft and tender, if you skipped the searing and sautéing part and just dumped everything in at the start. Or you can explore your own path. The thing is that, honestly, the biggest effort was finding the meat, and searing it. Everything else was pretty by-the-numbers. It may not be amazing, but everyone in the family ate it a second night with no complaints, and all told it cost like $30-40 for 6-8 servings. That’s not bad turn-around.

No plugs for stuff today, since we’re so late, and I’m already beat up by the week, I don’t need the hassle of making links.

FRIDAY: I *MIGHT* DO A QUICK-LITTLE MICRO POST ABOUT A TOPIC THAT INTERESTED ME, BUT PROBABLY NOT.

MONDAY: WE BREAK BREAD FOR A FAT-LOADED SANDWICH JUST IN TIME FOR FAT TUESDAY.

Finally, the

Recipe

Instant Pot Lousong (Hong Kong Borscht)

Serves 8-10

Ingredients

2 pounds beef shank or oxtail

1 tbsp vegetable oil (HW)

1 medium onion, coarsely sliced (meaning anything under ¼” thickness is fine)

2 medium carrots, chopped into chunks

2 celery ribs, chopped

4 cloves garlic, crushed

3 tbsp tomato paste

2 tsp paprika

2 tomatoes, quartered

1 quart beef broth or stock

Salt

¼ tsp freshly ground black pepper

2 bay leaves

2 red potatoes, washed and cut into 8ths.

½ a medium cabbage (about 1 pound). Cut into ¼” strips

2 tsp lemon juice

2 tsp Worchestershire sauce

½ tsp smoked paprika

Preparation

The Easy Way:

Place all ingredients up to Bay Leaves in a 6+ quart pressure cooker. Close, bring to pressure and cook for 30 minutes. Allow to release steam naturally If time allows.
Bring to a boil using the sauté function and boil for 5 minutes to condense. Add remaining ingredients, and additional salt and pepper to taste.

The Hard Way:

Turn the multicooker to sauté mode. Add olive oil, and use to brown beef.
Remove the beef from the pan, and add the vegetables in stages, cooking and stirring with each addition. First, the onion, cooking for about 5 minutes until softened. Then add the carrots, celery, and garlic, and cook an additional 3 minutes. Add tomato paste and paprika, and cook 2 minutes. Add the quartered tomatoes, and cook 1 minute. Add 1 cup beef broth and stir to deglaze the bottom of the pan.
Once deglazed, return the beef to the pan, add the rest of the beef broth, season with salt and pepper, and top with potato and cabbage. Close the pressure cooker, bring to pressure, and cook 30 minutes. Release the steam naturally if time allows.
Once steam is released, bring to a boil using the sauté function and boil for 5 minutes. Add remaining ingredients, and additional salt and pepper to taste.