Many of us will have suffered at the hands of school dinner ladies serving up vinegary pickled purple mush, made no more appealing by the obligatory crinkle-cutting. In the worst cases, it will have been enough to put you off this root for years. But if you haven’t tried it recently, rediscovering the sweet, earthy flavours of good-quality, fresh beetroot will be a revelation.
Crunchy, raw beetroot adds exciting flavour, texture and colour to salads – don’t forget to include its young leaves, which are also edible. Roasted whole, beets develop an even more intense, sweet flavour and are particularly adaptable – as happy accompanying a joint of roast meat as they are being blitzed into an alternative hummus or even grated into a ‘healthy’ chocolate brownie.
Larger roots can become slightly bitter as they age so, if you have a choice, stick with younger ones, about the size of a golf ball or plum. The peeled and vacuum-packed (but un-pickled) varieties available in many supermarkets are actually not bad if you’d rather avoid Purple Hand Syndrome, an unsightly but otherwise harmless affliction suffered by those of us who are too cheap to pay for anyone else to do the peeling.
Beetroot has seen a recent boom and bust as a result of its unfortunate labelling as another ‘superfood’ (a personal bugbear that I touched on back in March). In fact, there are some reliable studies that suggest a number of health benefits connected with eating beetroot, but to list any of them here would be to do a disservice to all the other healthy, nutritious and vitamin-packed autumn vegetables.
In season from mid-summer through to the winter months, October is the peak of beetroot productivity, when flavours are sky high but prices rock bottom.
Try: Beetroot, mascarpone and horseradish tart (p. 226)