Our attitudes toward beets are part of our DNA. There is, I believe, a gene that makes us either beet lovers or beet haters.
I say this as a lifelong beet avoider, who recently tried very hard to embrace them. I sought out beets of many colors. I welcomed organically grown golden beets from California and locally grown Baltimore County red beets into my kitchen. I experimented with cooking methods, steaming some in a water-filled dish in the oven, wrapping others in foil and roasting them.
I made two beet salads. In one, I paired diced beets with an interesting curry-and-garlic dressing, then added apples, walnuts, currants and greens. For the other, I diced golden and red beets, creating a dish that, when I added greens and goat cheese, could almost pass for a red, white and blue-green tribute to the Fourth of July.
Beet duty is messy. Red beets are the bullies of the species, both in taste and color. They bleed. After spending an afternoon chopping beets, my hands looked like I was an ax murderer. I know eating beets is good for me. Beets are, I have read, high in folacin, a B vitamin essential for cell growth and reproduction, and vitamin C. They are also very red, and exceptionally earthy, and make a lot of gardeners happy when they grow to the size of wheelbarrow tires.
Having said all that, the two beet salads I made would have tasted a lot better, I feel, without the beets. Beets don't light my fire.
In the interest of fairness, or feigned fairness, to the root vegetable, I spoke to a pro-beet person. Christian deLutis is the executive chef of the Wine Market restaurant in Locust Point. He told me a stirring story of how, some years ago, he became a beet believer when he ate an egg pickled in beet juice at Roots, an Amish market in Pennsylvania's Lancaster County.
Until he encountered this red beet egg, his view of beets had, he said, been framed by the "canned beet jobbies," those hard, purplish discs inflicted on kids in school cafeterias.
But when he tasted the red beet egg, "I fell in love with the sweet, earthy flavor of beets. And they have wonderful texture," he told me.
Now, deLutis regularly rubs beets with extra-virgin olive oil and roasts them in salt, serving them cold with blue cheese, or diced atop a salad.
In perhaps his most ambitious homage to the root vegetable, he "cooks" salmon by curing it with a beet-juice mixture.
He described the process to me. A farm-raised salmon is coated with a slurry made with salt, sugar, beet juice, coriander, dill and gin. Next, the beet-coated salmon is pressed between two weights and kept under refrigeration for 40 hours.
The beet-juice mixture "cures the salmon," he said, and the salmon picks up some of the flavor of the beet slurry. When the salmon meets the beet juice, the fish flesh takes on a color that deLutis described as "like a tequila sunrise" cocktail. Customers have told him they like the dish, he said, because it does not taste like beets, or at least what they think beets taste like.
Speaking of cocktails, deLutis said he was convinced that a mixture of "gin and beet juice would make a really good, very sprightly cocktail." But he admitted that the success of such a concoction would depend on deception, at least initially.
Nobody would knowingly quaff a drink that had beet juice, he said. So what a beet lover would have to do, he said, is slip a nonbeliever the drink without telling him what was in it. Maybe that would work for me.
The other day, I read that the big idea bouncing around among scientists who work in evolutionary biology is something called "evo-devo." As I understand it, scientists are saying that when a few existing genes are tweaked, creatures develop new shapes and body parts. An article in The New York Times said that research on finches showed that two genes determined the size and shape of the beaks that the birds grew.
That might work for me. Perhaps if I put my beak in enough gin-and-beet-juice cocktails, "evo devo" will occur and my anti-beet gene will go into remission.
rob.kasper@baltsun.com
Three-Beet Caviar With Endive and Goat Cheese
Serves 4
6 beets: 2 golden, 2 Chioggia, 2 red
1 very small red onion, finely diced
3 tablespoons white-wine vinegar
1/4 teaspoon sea salt, plus more to taste
freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons chopped parsley or chervil
2 Belgian endives, red or white
4 ounces fresh goat cheese
olive oil to taste
Leaving an inch of the stem and all of the roots, wrap beets in aluminum foil and bake in a 400-degree oven until they are tender when pierced with a fork, about 25 to 40 minutes. Cool, then rub them with a paper towel to remove skin. Cut them into chunks. Pulse each color of beets separately, being careful not to turn them to mush.
Toss the onion with the vinegar and 1/4 teaspoon salt and set aside. Toss each of the 3 types of beets with a third of the vinegar-and-onion mixture. Taste for salt and pepper. Toss again with parsley and chill.
Slice the endives crosswise into rounds and separate the pieces. Arrange mounds of beets, a mound of endive and a smaller one of goat cheese on each plate. Drizzle a little olive oil on the endive and cheese. Add pepper and serve. Toss together in a pile before eating.
Adapted from "Local Flavors," by Deborah Madison
Per serving: 188 calories, 9 grams protein, 11 grams fat, 6 grams saturated fat, 15 grams carbohydrate, 5 grams fiber, 22 milligrams cholesterol, 392 milligrams sodium