Ingredient: Beetroot
Category: Vegetables
Season: All:
Commonly known as beet or beetroot, are valued around the world as edible root vegetables
The usually deep-red roots of garden beetroot are eaten boiled either as a cooked vegetable, or cold as a salad after cooking and adding oil and vinegar.
A large proportion of the commercial production is processed into boiled and sterilised beetroot or into pickles.
Uses
In Eastern Europe beetroot soup, such as cold borscht, is a popular dish. Yellow-coloured garden beets are grown on a very small scale for home consumption.
Beetroot can be peeled, steamed, and then eaten warm with butter as a delicacy; cooked, pickled, and then eaten cold as a condiment; or peeled, shredded raw, and then eaten as a salad.
It is also common in Australia and New Zealand for pickled beetroot to be consumed on a burger.
Garden beetroot juice is a popular health food. Betanins, obtained from the roots, are used industrially as red food colourants, e.g. to improve the colour of tomato paste, sauces, desserts, jams and jellies, ice cream, sweets and breakfast cereals
A truly magnificent Vegetable, cooked or in a salad, it has a superb earthy flavour and a wonderful rich, vibrant colour.
There are two good methods of cooking beetroot:
Long and slow in the oven, which is suitable for larger, older beetroot, the other is for the first small bunches of fresh beetroot that appear in June.
Boiled beetroot, take one bunch of small summer beetroot, prepare as above and place it in a medium saucepan, then add salt and enough boiling water to barely cover. Simmer, covered, for 20-30 minutes, until the skin eases away when pushed with your thumbs.
To cook 1 lb (450 g) of winter-stored beetroot in the oven
Select even-sized beetroot (if you can)
Begin by pre-heating the oven to gas mark 3, 325 F (170 C).
Now prepare the beetroot by leaving the trailing root intact but trimming the green stalk so only 1 inch (2.5 cm) is left.
Wash well under cold running water, but leave the peel on.
Now place the beetroot in a parcel of double foil, sealing well.
Place the parcel on a baking sheet and bake on the middle shelf of the pre-heated oven for three hours.
To test if it is cooked, you should be able to ease the skin away with your thumbs.
Peel and serve hot as a Vegetables or cold with vinaigrette in a salad."
|