Nicole Is Cooking

As promised in my End of Summer post, here comes the Pickling and Preserving posts. We will start off with Beets a la Fantôme Chocolat.

Fantôme Chocolat loves beets. I first made them for him just over a year ago using the vinegar based recipe in The Joy of Pickling. This past February we took advantage of a snowy day and fresh beets at the year round farmers’ market to try out the red wine based recipe (I go for a nice Merlot) which he decided was a little sweet but preferable to the first recipe. Lately he has taken to eating his beets with pickled ginger (did I mention he is a bit of a mad scientist when it comes to combining flavors?). The recipe already uses a little ginger, so I suggested he might want to try pickling ginger with the beets to see what happens. He was all for it.

I forget how much ginger I bought, but he sliced it thinly with the mandolin and used it all.

We had about 10 pounds of beets to deal with after the picking extravaganza (obviously, this is not all of them).

To prepare the beets, they need to be trimmed, scrubbed and then boiled. Boiling makes the skin removal easier. Once the beets have reached the desired consistency, let them cool and remove the skin.

They can be halved, quartered, or sliced into rounds depending on your preference and their size. Here we see how they have been artfully sliced and layered with ginger (did I mention how Fantôme Chocolat also has a thing for how everything gets placed in the jar? You will hear about that more when I get to the peppers….).

Finally, the liquid gets added and the jars are hot water processed. The pickling liquid in this case was red wine, red wine vinegar, sugar, and spices (clove and cinnamon) were infused. We used less sugar than the recipe called for since Fantôme Chocolat found them a bit too sweet last time.

In the end, we ended up packing 4 quart jars and 5 pint jars full of beets and ginger. They need to sit for a while before they can be eaten so there is no verdict on how the experimentation with the recipe went. But, as far as I know, Fantôme Chocolat has yet to meet a beet he hasn’t liked.