On the face of it, beets are extroverts. The very veins of their leaves run magenta, red and gold. The roots come from the same high palette. When the hue is purple or red, which it so often is, then they are not just flamboyant, but inky as an angry octopus.
And yet for all this personality, beets are among the most neglected vegetables in the market. Their reputation is 50 years out of date. People grumble of beet fatigue from wartime “victory gardens.” Others think of beets only as canned items.
Then there’s the mess. Boil them and the beets stain your hands, your cutting board, your clothes.
No splendor is perfect. But before writing off the beet, bake it. Its color seems to retreat within it, becoming even more saturated, yet more beautiful. Once you’ve tasted a baked beet, it’s hard to have them any other way. It is one of the most arresting flavors to come from the field. Its sweetness is surpassed only by sugar cane, but then this sweetness is countered by a profound and complex earthiness.
This intensity makes it tricky to move on to the beet’s crowning grace, which is–don’t scoff–great subtlety. Faced with other ingredients, beets have a wholly magical tact. They are a superb foil. There is no more accommodating food. Beets complement almost every ingredient that any cook from anywhere can throw at them.
Heat treatment
Try baking them: Wash them if they’re cruddy. Cut them about an inch above the stem so the pigment doesn’t run. If they’re medium-size, pop them in the oven at about 375 degrees for an hour and a half. There will be a sweet, almost nutty aroma wafting around the kitchen when they’re done.
You can test for doneness much as you would with a boiled potato, by sticking something sharp into the beets and deciding if that’s the resistance you find palatable (the beet itself is edible raw). Let them cool. Store the ones you’re not going to eat, unpeeled, tightly covered in the fridge.
Peel the ones you are going to use. The skins should come away fairly easily. Then put them warm or at room temperature in a salad with toasted walnuts, goat cheese, mache and orange. See what happens.
Exactly. The walnuts will never taste nuttier, the “chevre” never tangier and orange never fruitier. Now try some more pureed with vinegar, sugar and horseradish. You’ll have a classic condiment, called chrain, perfect for meats or dumplings.
Now try pureeing roast beets into chicken stock to make borscht. Cook beets with star anise, finish them with anisette, a licorice-flavored liqueur (Pernod and Ricard are two brands). Chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten hits beets with Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce and capers, and they take it. Whatever you do to them, never for a second do they lose their integrity. Carrots should have such character.
Or flexibility. Beets accept whatever oil is in your larder: olive oil, walnut oil, pine nut oil. They become luminous and satiny in the presence of butter, bright and refreshing with vinegar. Various recipes insist on balsamic vinegar here, cider vinegar there, sherry vinegar the next breath and raspberry vinegar for yet another concoction. Beets embrace them all with equanimity.
Vegans use beets in lieu of meat; carnivores use them as pungent garnishes for beef. They go equally well with dill, parsley, chervil, tarragon or chives. You can bake them like potatoes, serve them slit and buttered. If you’re hungry and want a fast fix and don’t mind the mess, all beets require to constitute a meal are boiling, peeling and, if you’re feeling fancy, the addition of salt and pepper.
The beet of jokes
But all this versatility goes unsung. Instead, beets seem to be a cue for jokes about the Cold War and the Catskills, although beets don’t even originate from Russia, Poland or upstate New York. They come from the Mediterranean, where the wild progenitors of today’s domesticated crops grew around the seashore at tide lines.
Very baby beet greens sell at herb stalls at some farmers markets for about $7 a pound; just a few feet away at vegetable stalls, most customers want greens chopped off of beets sold for their roots.
The proprietor of one such stall, Santa Paula, Calif., farmer Paul Carpenter, puts this down to innocence. “Most people are used to buying beets in a can,” he says. “I don’t think the tops have ever occurred to them.”
These greens may be too coarse for salads but are delicious when treated like cabbage or kale: steamed, stir-fried or, best, sweated in butter, garlic and herbs, then simmered in chicken broth. Cook them as you would another cousin, Swiss chard. Beet greens should be chopped off and eaten separately if you plan to store the roots, which will keep in a cool, dark place much like potatoes.
And so to the cardinal beet flavor, the earthiness that is divine to some, dirty to others. It comes from a compound called geosmin, a byproduct of certain micro-organisms found in soil and vegetables. Beet farmers will say the biggest thing affecting how strong the flavor is isn’t beet variety, but type of soil.
Peruse the literature on geosmin, and one finds that this lowdown, earthy tang is desirable in beets and corn, less so in catfish or drinking water.
A collection of curious Web sites have sprung up offering beet juice, beet pigment, beet this and beet that as homeopathic remedies. Specialists won’t comment on their claims. What is clear is that, between their sweet roots and robust greens, beets are nutritious, particularly as sources of folic acid.
Salt lovers
On the subject of minerals, chefs remark on the varying salt content in beets. Irwin Goldman of the University of Wisconsin in Madison explains it by saying that wild beets are native to seashores, and are so salt-tolerant that in the wild that they can grow right at tide lines. Farmed varieties can vary wildly in natural salt content. It’s prudent to taste them while seasoning so as not to overdo it.
There would be more horticulturists eager to talk about the beet if it were a big commercial crop. But it’s not. Beet seedlings are sensitive little sprouts. It takes vigilance to protect them from predators. Soon after germination, beet fields require hand thinning. Agribusiness long ago wrote the crop off as too labor intensive to merit much industry-sponsored research.
One of Goldman’s colleagues at the University of Wisconsin, horticulture professor Helen Harrison, says industry indifference is actually good for specialty farmers. It protects the market for the little guys. Beet farmers then enjoy a devoted following and a great return from a crop that might require hand-thinning, but produces a great yield per acre.
“If I were a specialty grower, I’d grow them,” she says.
Grow them specialty farmers do, as do home gardeners. (Thompson & Morgan describes it as a “moderately popular” crop, and carries 10 varieties of seeds.) Beets not only appear across the country in farmers markets 45 days after the last frost, they keep on coming right as the last summer plantings are harvested throughout the autumn.
The last of these are taken slowly from cold store throughout the winter.
Beet tartare
Preparation time: 30 minutes
Cooking time: 2 hours
Yield: 3 1/2 cups
This dish is great served with fish. It keeps well for two days. Refrigerate well wrapped and bring to room temperature before serving. Adapted from “Jean-Georges: Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef,” by Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Mark Bittman.
6 beets, about 1 1/2 pounds
1 shallot, roughly chopped
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Few drops hot pepper sauce
1 teaspoon sherry or balsamic vinegar
6 cornichons (tiny pickles), roughly chopped
1/3 cup drained capers
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
2 tablespoons chopped parsley, plus more for garnish
Salt, freshly ground pepper
1. Heat oven to 350 degrees. Wash the beets; wrap them individually in foil. Place in a roasting pan or on a baking sheet and bake until tender, about 1 1/2 hours. (To test, poke a thin-bladed knife through the foil.) Let beets cool in foil. (Alternatively, drop the beets into salted water to cover and heat to boiling. Cook over medium heat until tender, 45 minutes to 1 hour.) Cool.
2. Peel beets; cut into pieces. Place in bowl of a food processor with the shallot, Worcestershire sauce, hot pepper sauce, vinegar, cornichons and capers. Pulse until the mixture is minced but not pureed. Scrape the mixture down between pulses.
3. Spoon the mixture into a bowl; stir in the mayonnaise and parsley. Taste and adjust the seasonings. Garnish; serve with steamed fish.
Nutrition information per tablespoon:
8 calories, 31% calories from fat, 0.3 g fat, 0 g saturated fat, 0 mg cholesterol, 60 mg sodium, 1.2 g carbohydrate, 0.2 g protein, 0.4 g fiber
Beets with orange and almonds
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Cooking time: 2 hours
Yield: 4 servings
Great dishes often have the humblest of origins. French chef Roger Verge is known for his Michelin-starred restaurant, Le Moulin de Mougins, near Cannes, but he dedicated his 1992 book, “Roger Verge’s Vegetables,” to his father: “an amateur gardener, but a caring one.” This beet dish comes from that book.
1 pound beets
Juice of 3 oranges
Zest of 1 orange
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter
Salt, freshly ground pepper
1/3 cup slivered almonds, toasted
1/2 orange
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped chervil or 1-2 teaspoons chopped fresh tarragon
1. Heat oven to 375 degrees. Trim leaves off the beets, leaving about an inch of stem. Set the beets in a roasting pan. Bake until the skins are wrinkled and loose, 1 1/2-2 hours.
2. Peel the beets; cut into 3/8-inch cubes. Place the beets, orange juice, orange zest and butter in a shallow saucepan or a skillet. Cook, stirring occasionally, over low to medium heat 15 minutes; raise the heat to high to reduce the cooking liquid, about 2 minutes. The beets should be coated with an orange glaze. Salt if necessary; add freshly ground pepper to taste. Turn into a warm serving dish; top with the almonds. Squeeze the orange half over the cooked beets; garnish with the chervil.
Nutrition information per serving:
250 calories, 56% calories from fat, 16 g fat, 7 g saturated fat, 30 mg cholesterol, 90 mg sodium, 24 g carbohydrate, 4.6 g protein, 4.9 g fiber
