Beetroot Three Ways

Last week, On The Side featured beetroot: this week it had a tribute. Today I'm going to combine the two. While this is the Tom Cooks! column, today's first two recipes are taken from Christopher Trotter's book, Beetroot. As regular readers will be aware, Christopher died three months ago. A fabulous cook and a lovely man.

If you haven't used raw beetroot before, the simplest way of cooking is to boil it. Wash and trim your beets. Place in a pan with lightly salted water, bring to the boil, and simmer. An average sized beet will take about 30 minutes, but it can be anything between 20 and 45 minutes depending on size. Check with a sharp knife. Leave to cool in the water, then skin. Doing this in the water will reduce the mess.

Alternatively, you can roast them. Preheat your oven to 180˚C/Mark 4. In a roasting tin, drizzle the beets in a little oil and roll in sea salt. If available, a few sprigs of thyme are nice too, but don't worry if you don't have any. Cover with foil. They will need 45 - 60 minutes.

Out of the 30 or so recipes in the book, here are two which caught my eye.

Beetroot Rosti

If you haven't made rosti before, you will be amazed how much water comes out of a grated raw potato. The same is true of beetroot. Squeeze a couple of times to get rid of as much moisture as you can.

Ingredients

200g raw beetroot, peeled, grated and squeezed; 500g raw potato, peeled, grated and squeezed; 2tbsp oil (Christopher recommends local rapeseed oil, but olive will do); (generous amounts of) s & p.

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Heat a tablespoon of oil in the pan. Dry the potato further in a tea towel and then season generously with salt and pepper.

Place half the grated potato in the pan and press down gently especially at the edges. Place the beetroot on top again pressing down to make an even cover over the potato. Season lightly. Placed the remaining potato on top and press down again and neaten the edges so no bits stick out.  Sprinkle a little more oil over.

Lower the heat and allowed to cook for five minutes. Shake the pan gently and the rosti will loosen. Place a baking tray on top and with care turn the whole thing over. It should be a lovely golden brown.

Slide the rosti back into the pan, brown side up, and finish cooking for another 10 minutes.

Beetroot Baked with Cream and Rosemary.

Ingredients

1 kg boiled and peeled beetroot; 3 cloves of garlic, peeled and crushed; 200ml double cream; 2 sprigs fresh rosemary; s & p.

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Heat the oven to 180˚C/Mark 4.

Place the rosemary in a small pan with the cream and bring to a boil. Remove from the heat and leave to infuse. Slice the beetroot thinly and mix in a bowl with the garlic, salt and pepper. Arrange in a gratin dish and strain the cream over the top. Place in a hot oven for 20 minutes until bubbling.

Finally, many of us on Boxing Day and thereafter may be serving up some sort of buffet or other to use up leftovers. You may well want a few salads to freshen things up. This is colourful and simplicity itself. It is what the title says.

Beetroot Salad with Sour Cream and Dill

Quantity of cooked beetroot, chopped however you like it; quantity of sour cream; quantity of chopped fresh dill; salt.

Mix everything together well. Check the seasoning. You could add pepper if you like. In this case I don't.

Tsimples!

 

Beetroot is one of a series of vegetable books written by Christopher with photographs by his wife Caroline. Dealing exclusively with veg which are grown in Scotland, each contains about 30 recipes. They have certainly opened my eyes to new ways of dealing with favourites, and teaching me how to use vegetables which otherwise I would have ignored. They make brilliant stocking fillers. Available from good book shops, farm shops and from Amazon.

Thanks to Christopher and Caroline for permission to reproduce the recipes.