Not just okroshka. Vichyssoise, dovga and 10 other recipes for cooling summer soups

Grape gazpacho with soy milk and almonds this summer is ideal for people who love all things unusual and unique. The soup recipe is simple and will require a pound of green grapes, a glass of soy milk, half a glass of peeled almonds, shallots (2 pieces), 1 lime, salt and pepper to taste. We throw almonds with soy milk into a blender, beat, add onions and raisins. We beat again. We season, cool, serve. Red grape gazpacho is prepared differently, so don’t mix the grapes when you buy them.

This summer soup will inspire you to create the impossible and achieve your goals with ease.

Okroshka is the perfect soup for classic lovers this summer. Usually, cucumbers, radishes, greens, boiled potatoes, eggs, green onions and boiled sausages are put in this soup. But it is better to give up all meat and make vegan okroshka. And to make it tastier, sausage can be replaced with mushrooms. Slicing also does not matter: someone likes a small cube, someone likes straws, someone rubs on a grater, and someone generously cuts into large pieces. But everyone knows that it is all the more important that the okroshka will be recharged. Kefir, sour cream kvass, ayran or sour cream with mineral water – choose your own.

Classic French summer soup, difficult and time consuming to prepare, but the result is worth it. Fans of traditional onion soup will definitely like it, but it can be eaten in the heat. Vichyssoise is a soup of mashed onions served with cream and croutons. First, leeks and shallots are taken, cut, then sautéed in a pan with butter and potatoes cut into medium cubes, poured with vegetable broth and cooked over medium heat for half an hour without lid. Then they are cooled to room temperature, cream is added, everything is pierced with a blender, seasoned with salt and pepper and cooled to 10 degrees. Eat cold, garnishing the dish with some cocktail shrimp and green onions.

To prepare this soup, you need to take a bunch of sorrel, a bunch of parsley or dill, a bunch of green onions, a bunch of radishes, 2-3 cucumbers, 4 boiled eggs, half a teaspoon of sugar, 200 grams of sour cream, 1.5 liters of water, salt to taste. Sorrel cut into finger-thick strips, boiled in lightly salted boiling water for 5 minutes and drained in a colander to cool. Cut the radish and cucumber into half rings (for a lighter consistency, you can grate everything), chop the greens, put them on the cooled sorrel and put them in the fridge for half an hour. Remove the yolks from all the eggs and set aside, finely chop the whites. Grind the yolks with sour cream, salt and sugar, add them to the vegetables, pour in mineral water and cool for another half an hour.

This cold soup is very popular in Bulgaria and North Macedonia. Its main components are cucumbers, herbs, curd or yogurt, water, vegetable oil, garlic and nuts. Sometimes it is served not only cold, but with ice. To prepare a tarator, take: 100 g of sour cream, a liter of plain yogurt or kefir, 6-7 walnuts, 3 small cucumbers, a few cloves of garlic, a bunch of your favorite herbs and water. Grate the cucumbers and garlic, chop the greens and nuts, then mix everything. Add cold kefir or yogurt, dilute a little, salt, pepper, add sour cream and, if desired, ice, garnish with parsley and serve.

To prepare this exotic soup, take 150 g of fresh trout, cut it into large pieces and sauté it quickly in a pan with a spoonful of olive oil. Then put 200-300 g of cold fresh mango puree in a deep plate and squeeze the juice of one lime into it, mix well. Garnish with pieces of cooled fish and halved blueberries, garnish with fresh basil leaves and a few drops of olive oil.

Shechamandi or shechamandy is a traditional Georgian cold soup cooked with dogwood or spinach. With dogwood, the soup turns red, and with spinach, it turns green. It will be difficult for Libras to decide, so try both options.

For the dogwood shechamanda, you will need a pound of fresh berries, a liter of water, two onions, a few tablespoons of flour, garlic, and mint. Separate the dogwood from the seeds, squeeze out the juice and fold the pulp apart. Fill the bones with part of the pulp with water and boil for 5-7 minutes, then strain. Divide the resulting broth into three parts: dilute the flour in one, cut the onion in the second and boil for 15 minutes, just leave the third. A minute before preparation, add grated garlic, mint and fresh dogwood juice to the onion decoction. Cool everything, mix, add the rest of the pulp from the berries and serve.

For the spinach shechamandi, take a saucepan, finely chop an onion in it and simmer it in vegetable oil. Then, in a small amount of vegetable broth, boil a bunch of fresh spinach (3-5 minutes) and put it on a sieve. In a blender, combine cooked onions, boiled spinach, a bunch of greens (coriander and parsley in a 1:1 ratio are ideal), garlic and a little vegetable oil. Beat everything well, dilute with broth if necessary, add a little cream, let cool and serve with half a boiled egg and suluguni.

Scorpios are noble lovers of exoticism, and not simple, but strange. The more unusual the food, the more they like it, so this summer they should definitely try Hungarian Cherry Soup, especially since it’s quite simple to make. You will need a pound of fresh pitted cherries, cinnamon, cloves, sugar (5-6 tablespoons), a glass of sour cream or 20% cream, a tablespoon of flour, a pinch of salt and 100 ml of red wine. Pour a liter of water over the cherries, add the cinnamon sticks and the whole cloves, sprinkle with sugar and boil for five minutes on a very low heat, without boiling. In a separate container, mix sour cream, flour and salt, then add to the hot cherry broth. Once cooled, pour in the wine, mix well and refrigerate for at least three hours.

In general, khira raita is an Indian sauce with cucumber in yogurt with mint, similar in a more liquid version in consistency to okroshka. Raita is usually called a sauce that is served with spicy dishes and put in place of dressing in salads, but today we are talking about the summer soup version. A la raita in the Russian version. The soup is very light, spicy and at the same time perfectly refreshing in the heat. And yes, it is quite easy to cook. Take three cucumbers, rinse, peel and rub on a coarse grater, put in a bowl, sprinkle with salt and let stand until juice appears (20 minutes). Meanwhile, whip a liter of natural yoghurt without additives (it will become more liquid), add the zest of a lemon, finely chopped mint, salt, pepper to taste and mix well. In a frying pan, fry a teaspoon of mustard seeds in a little vegetable oil (they will be ready when they crackle) and pour the oil with the seeds into the yoghurt. Mix everything well and leave in the refrigerator for two hours.

This dish is very popular in the westernmost part of Russia – the Kaliningrad region. It looks like okroshka on kefir without sausage, but with pickled beets. Lithuanians are offended when Russians say “Lithuanian cold borscht” and call this dish just borscht, but it’s actually a Lithuanian variant of beetroot.

To prepare Lithuanian borscht, take four cucumbers, a bunch of radishes, dill, parsley and green onions, five boiled eggs and two large beets. Peel the beets, cut them into small strips, simmer them in a pan in your own juices with two or three tablespoons of vinegar and leave to cool well. Cut the radish and cucumber into strips, three eggs into cubes (leave two whole) and finely chop the greens. Mix everything in a large saucepan, salt, pepper, pour a liter of kefir and leave to infuse for an hour in the refrigerator. Serve Lithuanian borscht topped with half a boiled egg. In one pan there will be 4-6 servings.

Cold oatmeal soup with vegetables may seem odd to some, but if you like creative solutions, you should give this option a try. And in general, for a wonderful taste, it is worth giving up prejudices.

To prepare the soup, take 300-400 ml of plain yogurt or 5% kefir, three tablespoons of oatmeal, a handful of fresh broccoli florets without stems, 50 g of fresh peas, dill and salt. Pour the oatmeal with a portion of yogurt or kefir and leave to swell overnight in the refrigerator. In the morning, throw the broccoli, peas, dill, oatmeal and remaining kefir into a blender, beat everything until smooth and serve.

Dovga is an Armenian summer soup with yogurt and wheat. It contains only six ingredients, but it is rightfully considered a masterpiece of national cuisine and will perfectly help Pisces to maintain excellent physical shape. It’s vegetarian and will certainly appeal to those who say you can’t pour kefir over Olivier and call it soup.

So, to cook dovga, we take 500 ml of matsoni, 2 egg yolks, millet (you can substitute spelled), a bunch of coriander, a few sprigs of dill and mint. Boil millet separately until cooked, cool. Pour the matsoni into another saucepan, press the yolks into it, bring to a boil and lower the heat. Add boiled millet, salt, spices to taste and cook, stirring constantly for 5 minutes. Remove from the heat, allow to cool, add the finely chopped vegetables and refrigerate for at least an hour.