Beets are an incredibly versatile root vegetable. They’re bursting with flavor, overflowing with nutritional benefits, and available in vibrant hues. In short, they’re an outstanding addition to your dishes and menus.
Farmer Lee Jones notes that beets are one of the most underappreciated vegetables. It’s true that if someone has ever eaten an overgrown beet, it could taste “nasty and gnarly.” Grown right, though, they are a culinary treat. Fortunately, at The Chef’s Garden, we grow plenty of farm-fresh beet varieties, cultivating them with love and attention and harvesting them at the perfect intersection of flavor and freshness.
Varieties include:
- Badger Flame Beet: When raw, this beet is incredibly flavorful and crunchy. Cooked, its texture becomes delightfully smooth. The eye-catching interior hues of this elongated beet are striped in flame-like orange and yellow.
- Bull’s Blood: Crunchy, sweet, and delicious, bull’s blood is a rare heirloom treasure, exceptional in every way. Add layers of flavors to your dishes with this choice, one with bi-petal green leaves with an eye-catching red vein.
- Candy Stripe Beet: Imagine a very sweet, tender, and smooth beet with an earthy finish—and that’s the flavor of a cooked candy stripe beet. Pink at the base, this unique red-pink variety features an interior with a fuchsia-white bullseye.
- Gold Beet: Looking for a beet with less sweetness, one with a full-on spinach-beet flavor? These orange-skinned beauties with bright golden interiors fit the bill. What a satisfying crunch, too!
- Red Beet: The oh-so-sweet and nutty traditional red beet has a nice, firm texture with a wine-red interior. Green leaves are painted with stems and veins of wine with the entire root vegetable delightfully edible.
- Mixed Beet: To get the best of all varieties, the mixed beet offering includes sweet sugar varieties, ones with strong and earthy flavors, and others in between. Benefit from a spectrum of shapes and textures and a rainbow of hues.
Use our farm-fresh beets in your dishes and menus—and enjoy browsing these beet recipes.
Beet Recipes
Our beet recipes include:
- Poached Beet with Curry Dressing and Pistachios
- Beet Brownies
- Golden Bloody Mary
- Beet Sidecar Cocktail
- Glazed Beets
- Baked Rainbow Roots with Leprechaun Pesto
- Poached Baby Beets with Mixed Microgreens
- Jalapeño Beet Salad
Plus, some of our treasured chefs use beets in recipes. Here, Chef Chris Montgomery shares how he prepares our flavorful beets, which includes slow roasting our baby beets with olive oil and salt for a signature fresh beet and goat cheese salad. He then coats the beets with lemon oil and blueberry balsamic vinaigrette. Chef Chris also enjoys dehydrating and then frying them or pickling them.
Chef Jamie Simpson of the Culinary Vegetable Institute greatly appreciates the marvelous texture of shaved vegetables ever since one of the CVI’s first chefs created a beet carpaccio that was as delicious as a slice of quality beef. The result: a recipe for a Root Vegetable Sandwich.
Jamie calls making sandwiches from root vegetables an “elusive, delicate space” before sharing that it isn’t that hard. Root veggie sandwiches are tasty when hot or cold, and you can switch out the vegetables and greens you use. You can feature one root vegetable or use a combo, and you can skip the bread. Flexibly delicious!
Through experimentation, Chef Jamie discovered that to optimize the meaty satisfaction of beets and other root vegetables, you just have to quickly cook them on high heat. Outside of this tip, the recipe can be as simple or as elaborate as you’d like. Add mustard, ketchup, or a spicy condiment. Or skip the condiments altogether and let the flavor of the quality ingredients shine.
Health Benefits of Beets
We’ve shared info about the health benefits of beets in previous posts, including these:
Plus, here’s a deeper look at the betalains found in beets. Beets with the betacyanin type are deep red/violet in hue, while ones with betaxanthins are yellow. In other words, the dark red/purple beets are higher in the first group, while our gold beets are higher in the second. Betalains can also help reduce inflammation and provide antioxidants, which may help protect people against cancer and arthritis, among other health benefits.
Now, there’s something intriguing about the presence of betalains in beets, a tribute to Mother Nature’s magic and mystery.
Returning to the mists of time, the beet “discovered” a new shade of red, previously unknown in the plant world. Then, strangely enough, the beets and their biological cousins stopped becoming the specific reddish hue used by the rest of the plants in the world and have used their own unique color of red ever since.
Scientists explain that most plants with red fruits and leaves contain anthocyanins. Ancient beets, though, developed betalains in red and yellow and then turned off their anthocyanins because they were no longer needed. Today, Swiss chard and rhubarb, among other plants, also have this betalain development.
Beet greens, meanwhile, provide lutein and zeaxanthin, two substances that contribute to eye health.
Farmer Lee Jones and Beet Leaves
In 2021, AgriNews-Pubs.com interviewed Farmer Lee and shared how, one day, the Jones family had planted too many beets, placing the surplus in a cool spot. Later, the layer of leaves that had received no exposure from the light, he discovered, had turned yellow with red veins, and “it’s one of the sexiest things that you can imagine. . . . We’re like, ‘Holy smokes, this is nicer than anything we grew on purpose!’”
The writer notes that although you may not have previously found plants to be sexy, you very well might after talking to Farmer Lee and spending time with his “infectious enthusiasm for farming. He’s a relentless experimenter, willing to try new techniques, ideas, and flavors.”
History of Beets
According to an article by PBS.org, people originally ate the beet greens and discarded the roots or perhaps used them in medicines. (At The Chef’s Garden, we love experimenting with using the entire vegetable from root to tip!) According to the article, beets also:
- Appeared in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon
- Appeared in Elizabethan tarts and stews
- Grew in Thomas Jefferson’s garden in Monticello
- Decorated fresco walls in Pompeii
- Enhanced the appeal of Aphrodite in Greek myths
Beets—like plenty of other crops—came to the Americans through European immigrants, with the Shakers being among the first to realize their commercial potential in the United States.
Here’s another fact from just a few decades ago: Bob Jones, Sr. decided that his family would return to the regenerative farming techniques that had served our grandparents and great-grandparents so well—techniques that lead to healthy soil, crops, people, and a healthy planet.
Regenerative Agriculture
“Regenerative agriculture is poised to move into the mainstream faster than many people expect, in my opinion. It is a classic triple-win situation. Consumers can receive healthier foods, farmers can have a more secure and prosperous future, and the planet will benefit because regenerative agriculture provides a better chance to heal and restore itself.” (Forbes, 2021)
At its heart, regenerative agriculture is a holistic system that allows us to cherish our soil and treat it as a treasured crop. It’s a system that allows us to leverage natural resources while leaving Earth in better shape than when we first began farming that plot of her land.
Using cover crops and otherwise focusing on regenerating the land, we’re building up healthy soil, earth that contains healthy microbes that allow us to improve and enhance the flavor, color, aroma, and nutrition of the crops we grow. When soil is positively microbe-active, this helps to keep away any bad stuff, such as E. coli. Crops develop strong immune systems that protect them from insect damage and disease, just like strong immune systems help to protect people and their health.
Independent research has confirmed that some of our crops contain up to 500% more minerals than USDA baselines. Our agricultural research labs are continuously seeking new methods to provide chefs and home cooks with superior flavor, quality, nutrition, and visual appeal. For more information about regenerative farming, click here.
Order Your Farm-Fresh Beets
Hopefully, this information has inspired you to find even more creative ways to use the flavor and eye-catching appeal of the unbeatable beat.
We invite you to talk to your product specialist to see what varieties are at the peak of freshness and flavor, and then order just the right beets in the best sizes to paint a delicious picture in your dishes and menus. New to The Chef’s Garden! Welcome. Here’s information about how you can contact us.