A Late Harvest of Beets

I normally plant beets in the fall and harvest them in very early spring.  We really like beets around our house.  We plant two different varieties - Bull's Blood Beets and Detroit Red Beets.  In the past we've also planted Golden Beets and Chioggia Beets (looks like a peppermint candy when you cut it in half).  This year the beets were up and out of the ground when we got a really hard freeze.  The freeze pretty much wiped out half the crop.  We couldn't have that, now could we?  So we replanted.  We've been eating the surviving beets from the freeze by roasting them in the oven.  Now, the later planted beets are coming in as well.

Tricia picked a basket full the other day (along with a couple of big radishes).  We talked about pickling some beets so we can enjoy them later.  Growing up, when we would have family gatherings, there was always a table with different things for snacking.  Things like black olives, sliced pickles, a tiny whole pickle called a gherkin, pickled okra and, last but not least, pickled beets.  I always liked pickled beets.  They are so sweet and tangy with the vinegar and cloves in the recipe.

Beets are sweet by themselves, but most pickled beet recipes call for added sugar.  My wife is not a fan of added sugar.  In fact, if a cake or cookie recipe calls for a cup of sugar, she's only putting a half of cup, you can take that to the bank.  She always tells me, "See, it's still good."  And my response is, "Yeah, but it coulda been better!"

Well, lo and behold, she found a recipe for pickled beets with no added sugar.  I wasn't going to participate in that heresy, but I heard her banging around in the kitchen and heard the pop of the lids and she pickled the beets... with no added sugar.

We'll stock up the pantry with these deep red beets.

I will let you know how they taste when we open a lid to try them out.  We've been rotating the stock out of the pantry and just the other day, we popped the lid on a quart of pickled beets that had been in the pantry since 2017.  The color had faded.  They weren't the bright, deep red you see above.  They were a dull, faded purple color.  Not very appetizing looking.  But they were sealed up tight and I figured we'd try them.  They were delicious!  We will see how this fresh batch turns out.