52 Foods Week One: Beets

I went to the Farmers’ Market yesterday to find a candidate for the first week of Fifty Two Foods. Being winter and a Wednesday, the market did not have a lot of vendors with fresh produce. After a quick survey, I settled on beets for this week.

I bought one bunch of organic beets from Fiddler’s Green Farm out of Brooks, CA.

A Bunch of Beets

I was asked to bring a salad to some friends’ home for a dinner, so I also grabbed some organic salad greens.

My plan was to cook the beets, and toss them in the salad with some goat cheese. I really like roasted beets, but sometimes I find the denseness of their flavor and the sweetness a bit overwhelming. I wanted to do something that would cut the richness a bit, and decided to salt roast them, figuring that the salt would balance the sweetness.

After washing the beets and slicing the ends off them. I poured a little pillow of kosher salt onto foil squares. I positioned each beet on the salt, then pulled the foil edges up to make a sort of sack. Then I poured more salt in each sack to cover about 3/4 of the beet.

Cover it Up

I finished wrapping the beets in the foil, and shook each one upside down a bit to distribute the salt. They sounded like little maracas.

I baked the beets for 35 minutes at 350ºF. Upon removing them from the oven, I unwrapped the top of the foil to let them cool a bit. The salt absorbed the beet juice, and had formed a sort of crust that broke away when the foil was opened.

Opening the Foil

Once the beets were cool enough to handle, I peeled them and sliced them for the salad. They tasted lightly salted with some of the sweetness cut, just like I had hoped. I finished the salad with a some crumbled goat cheese and a dijon-balsamic vinaigrette.

Salad is Served

You can view more photos here.

2 Replies to “52 Foods Week One: Beets”

  1. What did you do with the Beet Greens. You should never buy beets, in my opinion if the greens don’t look as good nice fresh chard.

    Pleas advise,

    Your Aunt Michele

  2. I had planned to braise the greens, but didn’t get around to it. We have another batch of beets from the market, and I’m going to try to cook up the greens this time.

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