Stuart Monk | Dreamstime.com
Alain Passard, founder and head chef at L’Arpège in Paris,
pulled meat from his menu in 2001, because, he announced, he wanted
more culinary challenges. “One day I woke up and asked myself, ‘What
have I done with a leek, with a carrot?’ Nothing, or maybe just 10
percent of what can be done with a carrot.”
Some of his dishes are complex — a chocolate avocado
soufflé, a three-layered nasturtium soup — and others are
the culinary equivalents of sniffing a flower, uncomplicated bites that
present the morsel’s true flavor. A beet baked inside a solid pyramid
of salt, for example, provides a striking but unobstructed journey into
the depths of beetitude.
A beet’s texture ranges from wood to jelly. Its flavor is dirt and
sugar. It stains anything you cook it with and anything else it
touches, including your insides. Most people are at a loss for what to
do with beets and simply boil or roast them. But there are many finer
things to do with beets that are just as easy.
Here’s a trio of recipes to help set you on a beeten path less
traveled. All are simple, use just a few ingredients, and give striking
results. In addition to my version of Passard’s beet in a salt pyramid,
there are beets in chocolate sauce as well as the workingman’s beet,
the one for dinner tonight, braised in vinaigrette.
While I’m focusing here on the beet part beneath the ground, the
leaves also are worth eating in almost any context, including steamed,
sautéed, in salads, etc. For raw use, you may want to trim the
stems, which behave more like roots, with strong flavor and staining
potential.
Since I can’t bear listening to myself trying to pronounce
betterave rouge en croûte de sel, I call
Passard’s beet dish “Blood on the Snow,” though it isn’t mine to name.
Since I can’t get my hands on Passard’s sel de Guérande, which
is brown-ish, my white coarse sea salt looks more snow-like.
Mix four cups of coarse salt with a cup of water, stirring until it
reaches the consistency of wet snow. Build an inch-plus base of salt in
an oiled cast-iron skillet. Clip the beet stems just above the tuber
and snip the thin taproot. Place the beet firmly upon the salt
pedestal, and pack more wet salt around it. Use a putty knife to shape
and smooth the salt into a perfect pyramid, if you like. The beet from
a messy pile will taste exactly the same.
Preheat the oven to 300 and bake the salt/beet pyramid for two hours
(an hour and a half for medium or small beets).
Remove the beet from the oven and let it cool for 30 minutes. The
salt will have hardened into a granular shell, so use a hammer and
chisel to open the tip of the pyramid, revealing the beet in its cavity
of salt. Remove it and brush off any salt clinging to the skin. Cut the
warm vegetable into wedges and drizzle with aged balsamic vinegar.
The vinegar lends acidic sweetness and a subtle, forest-like
complexity that interacts with the musky beet in a marriage not unlike
the pairing of wine and meat.
Beets are also perfectly at home on the sweeter side of the flavor
profile and go especially well with chocolate. I’ve played around with
brownies, cakes, and cookies and improved many a recipe or mix with
grated beet. These days I prefer the easy way: beets in chocolate
sauce.
Slice beets into quarter-inch rounds and boil in just enough water
to cover them, adding more water as necessary. When cooked to your
desired tenderness, add chocolate chips, preferably dark. Keep adding
chocolate until the sauce is as thick as you like it. Adding a little
heavy cream is a good option here — it will vanish without a
trace into the deep chocolate beet blackness. Don’t forget to drink the
chocolate beet sauce at the end, with or without milk.
The above recipes are simple, yet so spectacular they seem like an
event. But at home, when I just want some pedestrian, low-profile beet
for dinner, I keep it simpler. Trim and slice a beet, sprinkle with
salt and pepper, add equal parts balsamic vinegar and safflower oil to
generously cover the bottom of the pan. Place the pan in the oven,
about six inches beneath the flame, and broil until the beet slices are
soft, flipping them at least once. Serve with the crème of your
choice — a dollop of chèvre or sour cream, perhaps, or a
big glop of mayo (my favorite mayo is actually fake mayo: grapeseed oil
Veganaise).
Minus the vinaigrette, this is how I usually cook red meat. So it
comes as less of a surprise to me that the salt-and-pepper braise
brings out the beet’s meaty earth tones. Not many vegetables are
versatile enough to taste sweet like candy one moment and rich like
meat the next. Just watch your step, because beets can be moody. It’s a
vegetable that’s part mineral, and you’d think part animal when you see
it bleed. While it isn’t exactly high maintenance, the beet demands to
be treated right, and that includes making it the center of the
universe. The beet doesn’t play well with others. It wants all of your
attention.
