What We’re Cooking This Week: Some Pretty and Sweet Beets

Wellspent Market founder Jim Dixon has been writing about food and restaurants for Willamette Week for a long time. He wants our readers to eat well, and he shows them how with the recipes he creates just for us by using simple cooking techniques and easy-to-find ingredients.

Beets split eaters into distinct camps: love ‘em or hate ‘em. Haters—like Michelle Obama, who banned them from the White House garden—cite the vegetable’s dirt-like flavor. The earthy character stems from the unique ability of Beta vulgaris to create a musty compound called geosmin. Humans can detect it in very low concentrations—possibly an evolutionary trait to keep us from drinking bad water.

Lovers embrace the dirt, and they point out how sweet beets can be, not surprising since they’re the only vegetable that produces sucrose. (In the mid-1700s a couple of Germans figured out how to make table sugar from beets, and today about half of America’s sugar supply comes from them.)

In the 1990s Wolfgang Puck introduced a beet and goat cheese salad at his famous Los Angeles restaurant, Spago. Martha Stewart championed the combo, and suddenly beets were everywhere.

At some point during the beet resurgence I discovered Chioggia beets. Sweeter and lacking of that earthy geosmin taste, Chioggia (key-oh-ja) beets could be simply boiled, sliced and drizzled with good olive oil. They didn’t need the creamy tang of goat cheese or an aggressive vinaigrette to be delicious. And their distinctive red and white “candy stripes” look good, too.

Like their botanical cousins, Chioggias don’t really roast well if you leave them whole. But cut them into slices before roasting and you get the caramelization and concentrated flavor that makes roasted vegetables so tasty. I usually eat them on their own, but roasted Chioggias also work as vehicles for baba ghanoush, romesco, Italian-style salsa verde and similar spreads and sauces.

Recipe

• Chioggia beets*
• Extra virgin olive oil
• Kosher-style sea salt

*Sometimes labeled pink or candy stripe beets; golden beets are similarly sweeter and less earthy than red beets, though the same technique works for regular red beets, too.

Preheat an oven to 400F.

Wash the beets under cold running water, then peel. Cut them in half from stem to root, then slices into ½ inch thick half moons.

Coat the bottom of a heavy skillet or baking dish with olive oil and arrange the beet slices in a single layer.

Sprinkle with salt and roast at 400F for about 45 minutes, or until easily pierced with the tip of a knife. Serve warm or at room temperature.