Making Pickled Beets

Many people - especially kids - make faces and turn up their noses when you talk about beets. Beets just aren't their favorite thing. I can understand that.  There are certain things that I'm not crazy about eating.  Turnips, for instance.  I happen to really like beets.  I like them cooked in broth.  I really like them roasted in the oven with olive oil.  But I'll show you tonight a way to prepare them that most everyone can enjoy.  Pickled beets.  My grandmother we called "Bumby" always served pickled beets as an appetizer at Sunday dinner and on special occasions.  I liked them as a kid and I still prepare and eat them pickled today.

First, you gotta pick 'em.  I grow two types of beets.  This is a bull's blood beets. The leaves look the color of bull's blood, I suppose.

Bull's Blood Beets

This is a Chioggia Beet.  It originates from Italy, and I'll show you something neat about this variety in a minute.

Chioggia Beets

I picked 10 pounds of fresh beets in a produce bucket since that's what the recipe calls for.

I brought them in and washed them to get all the dirt off of them.

Then I sliced the bottoms and tops off of them.  Chioggia on the left and Bull's Blood on the right.

Then I cut the beets all up - in chunks and slices.  Here's the neat thing I want to show you about Chioggia beets.  When you slice them, they look like a peppermint! You know, just like a starlight mint.  The others behind the "eye-catchers" you see below are the Bull's Blood beets.

If you cut the Chioggias 'long-ways' the red & white designs really stand out!

But enough about what they look like.  Let's make pickled beets, so we can talk about what they taste like.  Obviously, you'll need 10 pounds of beets.  You'll also need a couple of cups of sugar.  I used some pure cane sugar that is grown an hour south and east of here.  The recipe also calls for 1 Tablespoon of kosher salt, a quart of white vinegar and 1/4 cup of whole cloves.

A quick side-note about cloves.  I love the way they smell.  If I inhale deeply in the container of cloves, it reminds me of my childhood.  When I was a boy, my grandmother, Bumby, showed me how to make a craft with cloves.  It is a simple craft project that involves an orange and a bunch of cloves.  She had me press the pointed end of the cloves into the orange until it was pressed all the way in.  We repeated that with a bunch of cloves all over the orange until you couldn't even see the orange anymore.  It was solid cloves.  It was a sachet, I think you call it, to be placed in a closet or drawer to make everything smell nice.  Over time the orange got smaller and smaller, but it smelled GREAT!

Sorry for the diversion.  Back to making pickled beets.  Here are the ingredients ready to go.

Put the 10 pounds of cut up beets in a pot of water and bring to a boil, cooking for about 15 minutes or until they are tender.  I tested the tenderness with a fork.  When I could press the fork in easily, they are done.  Pull out 2 cups of the "beet water" to save for later.

Sterilize your jars, lids, and rings in boiling water.  In a separate pot (I made a big mess in the kitchen), add the sugar, vinegar, beet water, and salt and bring it to a boil.  While you are waiting for this to boil, fill your jars with beets.  Then pour the hot brine over the beets in the jar using a canning funnel.

Before putting the lids on, sprinkle the cloves and then seal up the jars.

Put a rack in the bottom of a stockpot so that the jars aren't touching the bottom and bring the water to a boil.  Put your jars of beets in the boiling water, making sure that the tops of the jars are covered.  When the water returns to a boil set your timer for 10 minutes as that is how long you will process them.

Pull them out and let them cool.  My pickled beets don't look traditional as the Chioggias are white and aren't the traditional deep red color, but that's okay with me.  They still taste great!

We'll snack on these before meal time and on special occasions.  Tasty pickled beets.  Nothing goes to waste.  The beet tops and peels get fed to the milk cows. They love the sweetness just like we do, I assume.  I even found an interesting use for the boiling water that I'll show you the next time I post.

Checking out The Chioggia

Back in THIS POST we talked about planting Chioggia Beets for the first time this past fall.  Chioggia beets are an heirloom variety from Italy that made their way to the United States in the 1860’s.  They have the characteristic of red and white stripes, resembling a starlight mint.  They were are named after the fishing village in Italy from whence they originate.

It was time to harvest them and eat them in order to make room in the garden for some Chinese Long Beans I wanted to plant, so I walked out to the garden and pulled a few out of the ground.  I carried them inside and washed them off in the vegetable sink.  Looking at them from the outside, they resemble other beets we’ve grown, such as the Bull’s Blood and Detroit Dark Red varieties.

Chioggia Beet Roots

Tricia cut off one of the ends in order to begin chopping up for oven roasted beets using the recipe we described in this prior blog post: Roasting Beets  Once the end was cut off, well, that’s where the resemblance to “normal” beets ended.  The root was white inside with a bit of red showing up as well in the very center.

Taking a look inside

This is what we found when we cut into the beet!:

Looks like a Starlight Mint

Pretty cool, huh?  Supposedly they are supposed to be sweeter than normal beets, but after roasting them, I couldn’t tell any difference.  They tasted like… well, beets!  I’ll plant more of these next year as they taste good and look even better.

Another Chioggia Beet that is more red...  Very interesting looking

Marching to the BEET of a Different Drum

A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world. He is producing something to eat, which makes him somewhat

independent of the grocery business, but he is also enlarging, for himself, the meaning of food and the pleasure of eating. The food he grows will be fresher, more nutritious, less contaminated by poisons and preservatives and dyes than what he can buy at a store. He is reducing the trash problem; a garden is not a disposable container, and it will digest and re-use its own wastes. If he enjoys working in his garden, then he is less dependent on an automobile or a merchant for his pleasure. He is involving himself directly in the work of feeding people. - Wendell Berry

I like that Wendell Berry quote.  It kind of encapsulates everything bouncing around in my little brain about small-scale agriculture at any given time.  I am always amazed that you can work up the soil a little bit, removing the weeds and put a dead seed into the ground and with a little water and a bit of sunshine, in no time flat little seedlings are popping up out of the ground.  If those seedlings are cared for properly and if the grower exercises a bit of patience, the happy gardener will be harvesting delicious vegetables that will be enjoyed by family members.  Healthy vegetables from healthy soil results in healthy people.

Of course there are things that we can't grow here.  I love mangoes, but we can't grow them, so we must purchase them.  While many are content to purchase most of their vegetables and fruit at the grocery store, if it is possible, growing them yourself is the better choice in my humble opinion, but maybe I march to the beat BEET of a different drum...

Well, it was, after-all time to get the beets planted.  We like beats.  They are great sliced and cooked in a pot with a little broth.  They are great pickled, making a delicious appetizer and fantastic cut up and roasted in the oven.  In the past we threw the beet greens over the fence to the cows, but now we've started eating them. Sorry cows.  So I worked up a 24 foot row that is approximately 30 inches wide.  I stepped off three similarly sized blocks on the row and using a stick, made two furrows, evenly spaced, on top of the row.

Late afternoon sun shining on the Beet Row

We're putting in three different types of beets this year.  We're using the old stand-by variety that we always plant - Bull's Blood Beets.  While varieties like Detroit Beets have green greens. Bull's Blood Beets have red greens.  We tried a new variety last year called Golden Beets.  While we didn't get the yield with the Golden Beets that we did with the Bull's Blood Beets, we're planting them again.  They just look so nice on a plate next to the red beets -  a work of art, you might say, on your supper plate.

Three beet varieties

So the new variety we're trying this fall in the Chioggia beet.  I'm assuming it must originate from Chioggia, a town in the province of Venice in Northern Italy.  This beet comes highly recommended, and I've read that it is the SWEETEST beet there is.  We'll see.  I think it is interesting because the beet, when sliced, looks kind of like a starlight mint.  Starlight mints will always remind me of the candy that you try to quietly unwrap in church prior to the end of service and pop in your mouth to ward off the dreaded "church breath" that threatens to offend your fellow congregants if not properly dealt with!

The "Starlight Mint" Beet 

Beets are a very pretty root crop and they come from a dull, unassuming seed. Although I've tried to save seeds from beets, I've never been successful in getting them to flower.  Perhaps I'll try again this year.  

Beet Seeds

I sowed these seeds in soil that I've amended with lots of organic matter over the years, so it works up nice and deep.  They are planted 1/2 deep and spaced about 4-6 inches apart.  In addition to the three varieties shown above, I'll also plant Mangel Beets, a mammoth beet I talked about HERE to feed to the cows during the cold weather.

I like beets and I like to march to the beat of a different drummer.  Henry David Thoreau said at the end of Walden:

"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."

Sounds like good advice to me...