Sometimes you just have a near 3 pound beet on your hands, and you need to do something with it. You know? (Just in case you don’t believe me here is proof:)
This baby sat in my fridge for nearly a month before I decided to take him (her?) out for a nice roast. I generally always roast my beets before I even have a plan for them and this gorgeous hunk (babe?) was wrapped in foil and in the oven before I thought too much about it.
Sometimes, for the sake of moving food along (you know the vegetables that linger in your fridge for a while with no purpose in life?), I will apply a simple cooking technique to them so as to force my eating of them. And I love beets! So don’t get me wrong when I say “force”…
….the point is that I wasn’t that sure what to do with said beet, so I decided to just roast it, do a bunch of other stuff during the hour it was in the oven, and then go from there. Beets are delicious plain, drizzled with extra virgin olive oil, a little balsamic vinegar, or accompanied with (my favorite) some chevre (soft fresh goat cheese).
Before deciding to ultimately pickle this sucker, I treated myself to exactly that: nice warm beet from the oven, with some delicious local Donnay Dairy goat cheese. This beet was amazing. The flavor was sweet and not too dirt-like (if you know what I mean). It was exactly what I’m looking for in a beet. By the time I’d finished my snack, I knew what I wanted to do.
I quickly skinned and cut the beet up and put it into a quart mason jar. I then boiled up a mostly traditional, on-the-sweet-side, pickled beet brine with a combination of some brown rice syrup and barley malt syrup that I had (the classic recipe has sugar). As the mixture came to a boil, I tasted it frequently, looking for the exact level of sweetness I desired.
These pickles are really fantastic to have around. They are a great addition to practically any green salad, and taste wonderfully as a side to many dinners that involve classic meat dishes like pot-roast, chicken, or burgers.
Pickled Beets
4 beets
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup rice vinegar
2 Tbsp. brown rice syrup, honey, or barley malt syrup
½ of a cinnamon stick 3 cloves and a pinch of allspice
1) Wrap beets in foil and bake in a 400 F. oven for 1 hour. Unwrap and allow to cool. When cool enough to handle, peel the skin off the beets and trim each end. Cut into pickle-sized pieces and pack into a jar.
2) Combine the water, sweetener, vinegar, cinnamon, cloves and allspice in a medium saucepan. Simmer for 2 minutes. Taste for sweetness and if not sweet enough add more to taste. Pour liquid over beets in jar to cover. Store in the fridge. Will keep one month.
