Beetroot – pickled!

Look at all this inspired pickling – my friend L sent in a recipe for a pickling fresh beetroots that she picked from her family garden. Reminds me of all the pickling we’d traditionally do with my grandmother every summer. Appropriately, this is L’s grandma’s recipe and technique, tried and tested.

These look beautiful and are delicious all by themselves or with a little goat cheese, lamb’s lettuce, or citrus.

You’ll need:

• red beets
• red wine vinegar
• salt
• pepper
• ground anise

1. Pick the beetroot and wash off the dirt. Cut off the stalks, leaving about 1-1.5in above the top of the beet. This is important, as if you cut the stalks too close to the beets then the colour will bleed out as you cook them and they will turn white.

2. Assembly your pressure cooker. If you’ve never done this before (like me) it’s quite easy. Place the stand in the bottom of the cooker, fill with 1-2 pints of water, add in the sieve/shelf and place the beets on top of this. Be sure to place the seal in the lid securely, if you have not used the cooker in a while, place a bit of olive oil on your fingers and run them over the rubber seal. If you don’t have a pressure cooker, then steam the beets in a large pot, this will take much longer than the times mentioned below, depending on the size of the beets it will take up to an hour-an hour and a half.

3. Turn the heat coil to high and place the pressure cooker on the coil, when the water is boiling and you can see steam place the lid on the cooker and seal. Once the pressure mark on the top of the cooker pops up to indicate 5-10lbs of pressure (depending on the size of your cooker) turn the heat down to half. Cook the beets for approximately 10minutes. Again, this depends on the size of the beets. Smaller beets = less time and larger beets = more time. We took out the smaller beets after 10 minutes and cooked the larger beets for an additional 5-7 minutes.

4. Once the timer sounds, remove the cooker from heat and allow it to cool. This is very important! Do not open the cooker until the pressure valve on top of the lid has dropped – this shows that there is no pressure (built up steam in the cooker) remaining and it is safe to open the cooker. You can cool a cooker by running it under cold water until the valve drops, this is great if you’re short on time, or just impatient (like me!)

5. Carefully remove the beets from the cooker – they will be hot! At this point, top and tail the beets and remove the skin, removing the skin should be very easy, it should peel off by just dragging a (blunt) knife over the skin [note: I hold them in a paper towel and use another towel to wipe off the skins – K]. The skin and beets will stain your hands, use gloves if you want to avoid very pink fingers, or wash your hands constantly.

6. Allow the beets to cool, enough so that you can handle them. At this point, cut them into slices, about 3-5mm thick (about an eighth of an inch).

7. Quickly place the warm slices into sanitized jars and cover them with vinegar – you don’t want the slices to sit in the air too long otherwise they will lose all of their colour.

8.  For the pickling mixture: I used red wine vinegar which has already given the beetroot a nice flavour. Pickling vinegar is also a good choice, or cider vinegar. I would avoid any vinegar that is too potent or sweet. The vinegar does need to be at least 5% acidity in order to pickle the beet root. I also added a few pinches of salt, some ground pepper, and a pinch of ground anise to the vinegar.

9. Seal the jars and let the beetroot pickle (although we ate some with dinner the same evening and it already tasted great!)