Meet the beet: the drama queen of vegetables

January 5, 1:22 PMFood ExaminerEric Burkett

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Beets have a flare for drama. 

"The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious." – Tom Robbins

I have to disagree. I suspect Robbins met the beet in one of its more somber moods, at a boring party perhaps, or shortly after the beet had received some bad news. Scarlet red and glistening with butter or oil, the beet is a sultry, earthy vegetable and adds drama to any presentation

In short, I like beets, and there’s plenty to like, actually. Full of so many vitamins it almost seems a little unfair to other vegetables and versatile, beets (or beetroot as it’s known in most of the English-speaking world) are a boon to the home cook. Roast them, boil them, puree them, pickle them, grate them, sauté them, or simply eat them raw, beets are delicious. (Unfortunately, not everyone agrees and, apparently, our president-elect has spoken out against them publicly. Had I known that prior to Election Day…)

Beets are best, however, roasted. Already high in sugars, roasting concentrates the sweetness. You can lop off the greens (more about those in a moment) and trim off the root tail, scrub them clean and then wrap them in foil. Roast them at 375 degrees until they’re tender and the skins will slip right off with a minimum of mess. The messier, tastier, route is to peel them first, cut them into evenly sized pieces and then toss them with a mixture of maple syrup or honey, olive oil, and a generous amount of fresh chopped herbs like thyme or sage. Roast them at 400 degrees, stirring them often to keep them covered in the sweet juice and they’ll disappear from your guests’ plates.

And those greens? The only problem I have with beet greens is that there are never enough no matter how many beets you buy. Not only are the greens full of vitamins (they contain insane amounts of vitamins A and K, and – eaten raw in a salad – extremely high levels of Vitamin C, as well as generous to respectable quantities of all the dietary minerals) but they’re handy indicators, too, of the freshness of the beets in question. Fresh looking, sturdy greens mean the beets were just picked; beets sold without their greens offer no real indication of their freshness.

Beets are probably more appreciated in other parts of the world: Australians and New Zealanders serve their burgers with pickled beets as a matter of course, and borscht, the brilliantly colored beet soup, is a classic of Russian cuisine. The sugar beet, which contains up to 20 percent sucrose, is a valuable source of white sugar (and some argue the sugar from sugar beets is more healthful than cane sugar).Britons like them enough to name a band for them. Humans began eating beets  more than 2,500 years ago and they were quite popular among the Romans.

If the brilliant scarlet of beets is simply too much for you (the red pigment can’t be digested by some people and often passes through the intestinal tract with dramatic, albeit harmless, results), beets come in a variety of other colors. Gold beets are every bit as lovely and milder tasting, and Chioggia beets, with their pink and white stripes, would have – no doubt – given Mr. Robbins an entirely different first impression of Beta vulgaris.