Soup Map – 277 European Soups | Hacker News Reader

Soup Map – 277 European Soups

tasteatlas.com

207 pointsaaronbrethorst66 comments

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).

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!

It's in the map for me.

It's on the map, but you have to click on the little 20 in the upper right of Warsaw

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.

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.

> 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.

You can also make a starter yourself:

* https://www.polishyourkitchen.com/polishrecipes/white-barszc...

* http://inaniaskitchen.blogspot.com/2013/04/sour-rye-soup-sta...

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

Biriyani, paella and plov is basically same (yet tastes very different).

What I’m interested in is why most soups in Eastern Europe are stock/“bullion” style while in west they are more like goulash/curry/gravy?

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.

I love it! But in addition of 'Where to eat' I'd like to know 'How to make'.

Maybe I'm wooshing here, but there's a tab called "Recipe" ;)

Edit: Ah - I just noticed, it is only there on some.

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):

tomato soup with little meat balls

pumpkin soup

mixed vegetable soup

shrimp soup, fish soup, lobster soup

asparagus cream soup

spinach soup

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. :)

I've never had Romanian food but you piqued my interest now.

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).

In Poland we have zupa (soup), barszcz (borscht) and flaki (which is similar to your ciorba I think).

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

And also barszcz biały, litewski, francuski, jabłkowy, ogórkowy and of course, the most important: barszcz do picia :)

Oh and then there's also czernina, which basically is a soup made of duck blood.

I thought that Ciorba is only soured with lemon when you can’t get fermented cabbage juice? Maybe it depends on the region?

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).

The word "ciorba" comes from Turkish "çorba": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorba

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".

ciorba is also made with sour/fermented milk (chișleag/clabber)

Borscht classified as a Ukrainian dish. Good. As it should be.

What's your stance on rassolnik?

The only front of the geopolitical soup wars I'm dying on, is the borscht front. :D

I think it's a shared dish between Russia and Ukraine, but Russia already had solyanka on this site :)

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.

Barszcz is one of the most traditional Polish foods as well. I guess it's a slavic thing.

Yummy. It would be great to add a filter to show only the ones that include a detailed recipe, though.

Also those that can be made vegetarian. So many look delicious and could be prepared with a protein substitute.

This one is a pretty solid vegetarian soup:

https://www.tasteatlas.com/ciorba-de-loboda

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)

Loboda is this thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atriplex_hortensis

I Imagine you can use regular spinach if you don't have it.

If you are ever in Greece and want a delicious rich soup I reccomend Avgolemono[1].

1. https://www.tasteatlas.com/avgolemono

+10000 (super biased) for avgolemono -- one of those foods that I despised as a child but came to love as an adult.

Looks delicious. Seems there's a place in SF that makes it: https://kokkari.com

As for Russia they would need to add щи/shchi https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shchi

Щи да каша пища наша. Don't know how to translate that one properly:-)

Also there is the wikipedia reference, who would have guessed that soups come in lists? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_soups

It's already on there. Only 2.4 stars though :)

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.

https://www.tasteatlas.com/europe/soups?orderby=location

If you click on a number it expands the list.

Where is the Turkiye's soups. Tarhana Soup is an Anatolian soup.

http://www.turkishfoodandrecipes.com/2009/11/tarhana-soup-ta...

An other Turkiye's soups are here.. http://www.turkishfoodandrecipes.com/search/label/soups

I'm curious how they determine the 'Most Popular'.

Based on traffic to the site over a period of time, like pretty much every other 'Most Popular' algo.

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.

The soups look good though!

My favorite, the north German "Hochzeitssuppe" (wedding soup) is missing. It even has a Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochzeitssuppe

Just the best thing you can eat on a rainy cold November day.

It's not missing, the UX is just bad.

Hochzeitssuppe expands if you click on Nudelsuppe while you are at the map's maximum zoom setting.

I'm hungry now

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.

I think it's fine to consider these overalapping sets. Then we don't have to argue over edge cases.

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...

Very nice product (not just the soups), it's interesting to get a "flavor map" like this , and brings back memories of places once visited!

So we got a couple of food chains that are all about soups as main courses and they only manage to find out "Açorda"?

Anyway, nice overview, as starting point.

They also think caldo verde was invented after 1935.

Might have been able to include Irish Stew, and Coddle for Ireland.

Both are more stews.. but several other things already on this map are more like stews.

They're both there, but under Stews. https://www.tasteatlas.com/Stews

...I grew up eating Irish Stew and thought of it more as a soup too

Noted that solyanka spans a big chunk of eastern European countries. E.g. it's a staple in Latvia (probably from USSR influence).

Too bad the information on this website isn't open data (like OpenStreetMap). I'd love to contribute otherwise.

It's missing green cabbage stew in northern Germany. One of the best things ever

Should add Irish Guiness beef stew (also called Irish stew/beef stew?)

Swedish ärtsoppa and Finnish hernekeitto are the same thing.

this looks interesting, but I just want to say there are a couple dozen variations of fish soup in Italy, I'm not sure why they don't show up :)

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?

What's with the low Russia scores

Rating is meaningless, that Okroshka is worst-rated soup at 2.3 just cant be right.

Okroshka is one of my all-time-favorite summer dishes (I grew up in Russia). So refreshing to have a cold "soup" / "salad" hybrid.

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