BEET yourself up!
Forget those soggy, pickled slices... now beetroot is showing its true colours as a delicious superfood
BEETROOT was a staple part of my diet growing up. However, I am ashamed to admit that it wasn’t the freshly harvested kind, but limp, crinkle-cut slices crammed in jars of pickling vinegar.
These days, the very thought of pickled beetroot turns my stomach. I haven’t touched a soggy slice since 2000, when I discovered a recipe for baked beetroot in a Jamie Oliver cookbook. The flavour of the sweet, earthy roots, cooked with olive oil, garlic and marjoram, was a revelation.
I’m not the only one to have discovered the real taste of beetroot. It’s a vegetable that has spiralled in popularity recently thanks to the celebrity chefs who have been singing its praises. It’s on the menu at fancy restaurants and is a star of TV cookery shows.
In fact, sales of fresh esh roots, and productss made from beetroot, have risen by 20 per cent in four years. This has been driven largely by beetroot’s ascension to superfood status; the globular roots are a good source of iron and d folic acid, and are re packed with nitrates ates and antioxidants too help lower blood pressure.
Fresh UK beetroot is in season between July and October, but there’s no need to restrict yourself to the standard spherical purple roots in shops when there are more than 100 varieties you can grow from seed.
Not all are purple. There are yellow, orange, white and red varieties, with a few that reveal pale and dark concentric rings when cut open. Roots can be round, long and tapering, cylin- drical or flattened, like a doughnut. As a bonus, the foliage is edible, raw when young or cooked when mature.
Seeds can be sown directly into warm soil outside, from mid-April to late June – it’s possible to make earlier sowings, but these will need protecting with cloches. Most globeshaped beetroots are ready to harvest in about 11 weeks, while longer varieties will take closer to four months to reach maturity. Botanists think beetroot evolvedevolve from sea beet, a plantpl native to the shoressh of Europe, N North Africa and southern Asia.
Originally cultivated in parts of the eastern Mediterranean and Middle East, it was esteemed by the AncientA Greeks andan Romans. BeetrootB reached our shoress in the late 16th CenturyC and was extremelyl popular during the Victorian era, when plant-breeders introduced scores of new varieties.
Among them were ‘Rouge Crapaudine’ from France, ‘Detroit’ from the US, and ‘Cylindra’, a Danish variety from the early 1800s. Dating from 1840, ‘Chioggia’ was developed in the market gardens around Venice. With its pink-skinned roots that reveal dark red and white rings when sliced, it’s my favourite. The bull’s-eye pattern disappears during cooking, but can be preserved if it is served in salads.
There are lots of conventional round, purple beetroots. The bestseller with most seed companies is ‘Boltardy’, a variety from 1980 that holds the RHS’s Award of Garden Merit. It is highly resistant to bolting, a term used by gardeners to describe the production of flowers before harvesting takes place.
All varieties prefer light, stone-free soil in a sunny spot. Prepare the ground by digging, removing weeds and large stones, then raking until the texture resembles fine breadcrumbs. Make a shallow trench an inch deep, with a corner of a rake, then sow two seeds every 4in. When the seedlings appear, thin out to leave the strongest of each pair.
THE corky seeds actually comprise clusters of up to six seeds inside a dried fruit case. This contains a natural chemical that inhibits seed germination, so i mprove your chances of success by soaking seeds in warm water for about 30 minutes before sowing. Another option is to grow beetroot in large pots filled with multi-purpose compost.
Sow seeds thinly across the surface and cover with a 1in layer of finely sieved compost. Thin out seedlings, leaving about 4in between plants to ensure there’s plenty of room for roots to swell.
Looking after beetroot is a breeze. Keep the area around plants free from weeds, and water regularly, especially during dry spells.
Harvest beetroots while they are young and tender – roots left in the ground to mature tend to split or turn woody. Grasp the foliage firmly where it meets the top of the root and pull from the ground. After lifting, twist off the foliage about an inch above the root. Don’t cut the leaves. This results in roots ‘bleeding’ red sap and turning soft.