Beets That Don't Suck | Kenji's Cooking Show

everyone this is Kenji and these are beets I love beets I didn't used to love beets when I was a kid I remember eating them at a at a that I have potluck the first time I had was at a potluck and I think they came out of a can and they were served in a salad with boiled eggs or something over boiled eggs they were not very good I'm gonna show you the method I learned how to cook beets that got me to love beets what we're doing is we're gonna make a beet salad it's oh it's gonna be beets it'll be some citrus it'll be some arugula a dressing with some nuts and then maybe some cheese in there also but really the important part the important takeaway here is the method we're using to to cook the beets um when you cook them like this they come out sweet they come out tender come out earthy you know it's kind of like like dirt dirt candy you know beets are just so good beets just cannot be bested beets cannot be bettered know that there's a word for it I can't think of any beets so we're gonna think our beets we're gonna fold them in the little foil pouch like this so what we're gonna do is first fold up the edges and what you want to use here is heavy-duty foil important heavy duty foil not the normal stuff because the normal stuff will leak and the important part is that we want to trap in steam that's what kind of steam regime so you're gonna fold up the edges like that so now we got the beets in a nice little pouch and you can use any kinds of beets here I'm using these kind of baby beets from the farmers market but this works with you know you can do a bigger sheet of foil to do a lot of beets you can do big beets small beets it doesn't really matter this works for any beets so now you take time or any herb really I use thyme and rosemary usually I'm just cuz I like the flavor and I like I think these the they complement the earthiness of the beets nicely and then we're gonna take some olive oil doesn't drizzle it in that pouch like that I take some salt sprinkle it in there like that more oil then we're gonna take some black pepper freshly cracked black pepper very simple with a very gentle toss not so much that you break the pouch and that's it now we fold over the top you crimp it up a little bit you pull the edges in do another couple folds you really want to make sure that there's no air that's going to leak out and you're gonna see as this goes it's gonna kind of puff up and now we put it on a tray like that and we stick it in the oven I'm gonna do in the toaster oven you can do it in a regular oven a toaster oven I find easier for a smaller amount of things like this 350 degrees all right and those go in there and they close and then we're gonna come back in an hour or so so it's been about an hour the beats so you know with small beats like that it could take 45 minutes to an hour with larger beats it could take much longer it's a very forgiving method though so it's alright if they go a little bit longer you know if you if you forget about them forever that's fine it's gonna take a while for them to really overcook so what you want to do now is feel them and feel if they're soft and if they do feel pretty soft to that you know they're still rock-hard let him go back in there but if they do feel like they give a little you know like sort of like an avocado give the ripe avocado or a ripe say like a banana then you can go ahead and poke them with a skewer just to really check and if the skewer goes all the way through with little to no resistance then you're done now all we get all we're gonna do is we're gonna take them out I want to throw them on this plate looks there's a little leakage to that's fine now while those beats rest I'm going to go throw some nuts in here nuts and beats go well together these are pine nuts you could use pistachios you can use hazelnuts you get these almonds I'm just gonna throw those into the same oven that the beets were and meanwhile I'm gonna make a quick dressing here hmm so with Beats I like to do a little bit of honey which I already have out I'm gonna do some I want some sherry vinegar I think if I have it now maybe I don't have any red wine vinegar that'll do sherry vinegar yes I'm regular sherry yeah you know we'll do some a little red wine vinegar a little balsamic vinegar yeah that will do a little red wine a little balsamic this is just a kind of cheap billed balsamic actually what we'll do I'll do a little balsamic I'll do some lemon lemon and we got a shallot okay so the thing I like about beets a lot is that they're good room temperature and they're good cold you know they're kind of like like a Spanish tortilla or kind of like a yeah steak it's good it's good hot it's good room temperature is good cold so what you can do is you can roast a bunch of beets without any plans for them and just throw them the fridge and then when you want beets you got beets I'm ready to go like in a salad you can dice it up and reheat them in a skillet with some olive oil you know I think really the best way to enjoy them though is just in a simple salad like this I mean my book I've got a couple of different beet salad recipes my book being the food lab or over on Serious Eats I've got a couple beet salad recipes the sort of real classic modern classic I don't know if it's a old closet where the real modern classic is beets goat cheese and citrus pistachios also some kind of nuts in there so but we're gonna we're gonna do some you know sort of variation on this or we are going to do beets and nuts and citrus but in our case the citrus is going to be this character Orange and the nuts are gonna be pine nuts pine yoli's that's when I had you can use I really love hazel like a nice hazelnut vinaigrette or if you want to get fancy you can call them filbert's I've been teaching my daughter to call them to call them filbert's instead of hazelnuts filbert's and goobers instead of peanuts so you can see I'm just cutting kind of around here trying to get as much of the white pith off as possible while still without losing too much of the flesh inside there's gonna be a little bit of loss that's inevitable now hmm if I was at a fancy restaurant right now in the kitchen at a fancy restaurant I'm like the kinds of places I used to work and what I would do is I would cut out supreme' so essentially so what I would do let me give a small mmm what I would do is I would cut basically in between each layer of pith like that and you get what's called a supreme so it's a completely like pith and membrane free segments of fruit that said I am NOT in a fancy restaurant right now and I don't really mind having the pith of my fruit so I'm gonna split it in half that way split him again this way and then I'm just going to you and that is gonna be the the citrus part of the citrus and beet salad whoo you know what I'll do for cheese I know what I do I have some lob ney leftover we'll use that that's got a delicious mmm all right so lobna we got our mm-hmm little shallot there a little touch of balsamic vinegar I'm gonna do honey I think honey or brown sugar or date syrup some kind of sweet thing works really well with beets cuz you know just kind of enhances the natural sweetness brings out the natural sweetness of beets sometimes you find that with you know sometimes you want contrasting flavors with foods and other times you want complementary flavors so sometimes you know like a beet is naturally a little sweet and if you can somehow enhance that sweetness with like another type of sweetness you know like the sweetness of honey is different from the sweetness of beets what it does is it actually makes the beet it doesn't compete with the sweetness of the beet it actually sort of makes the beet taste beadier if you know what I mean makes your beets extra BT lemon I got a seat in there but I don't care that's gonna be a surprise reward for whoever finds it so I like to put my I'm making a vinaigrette like this I just put my bowl on top of a pan with a towel in it it doesn't move away I can very carefully whisk in my in the olive oil you're going relatively slow so that would get like a nice ogre it's like a full of full-on emulsion here I just want it to be completely broken oil and vinegar separate no what's nice is honey because it adds viscosity to the mix actually makes it easier to emulsify addressing go now quite perfectly emulsified but good enough good enough for our purposes all right so now these beats they're not completely cooled but they probably cool enough to handle mmm they smell great yeah alright so what I'm gonna do now healing beats super super easy um just a little bit of cool running water and I can hear the water police now but I'm just gonna go quick and then you want to take your thumb and just push off the peels they come right off and then you kind of push on the end and the top end and whatever comes off with you that's what comes off and whatever stays behind that's what you can eat this is the major appeal of this method this is why this method can't be bettered mm-hmm this method cannot be improved upon can't be I still don't know that word what am I thinking of you know what word I'm thinking of bested one-upped I'm not really sure something right on the tip of my tongue I can feel it I'm if I can feel it on my fingertips that word I'm looking for it alright so we got our beats there there's that stuff is only going to the compost I live in Northern California by the way and so here in the Bay Area compost gets collected by the city which is why I don't have to worry about what I'm gonna do with it afterwards so people are asking me what do I do with my compost the answer is I put it out on the sidewalk with all my other bins and then the city collects it and what's nice is that it's a you know municipal compost system so it actually you're allowed to put in meat you're allowed to put in soiled cardboard and paper paper products you can put in all kinds of things that you wouldn't want to put in your normal compost um all right there we go so we got our beets I'm gonna get a separate board for them because I don't want to stain my other board red if you're really really nervous about getting your boards your board stained you can put like a layer of plastic wrap down on top here but I don't really see the need I'm gonna keep them nice and kind of chunky here these are still pretty hot but not too hot or warmish you can let them cool completely if you want actually we're probably not gonna eat this until tonight I'm trying making some coal oven pizza too high well some New Haven style pizza I'm going to try loading up one of my ovens with coal to see if I can get that New Haven flavor although to be honest the real test is gonna be I'm gonna do it with coal I'm gonna do with gas I wanna see if you can actually taste the difference between coal and gas because I'm pretty convinced you're not gonna be able to taste the difference all right and I'm just these can go straight into the dressing hmm Oh people sometimes ask me about my sponges so the way I do my sponges I have one sponge well usually one sponge right now it's two sponges for some reasons two sponges that are meant for surfaces that we eat off of so cutting boards plates you know pots and pans and then one sponge four counters and then things that we don't necessarily eat off and then the sink is a kind of in-between space I what I'll do is you know we'll use the sink normally and then if I know that I'm going to be putting food into it I will disinfect it and clean it with one of my one of my you know countertop boats are one of my cutting board sponges and if I know I'm not going to then I will use my counter sponge all right what are we doing here now let's check on those nuts perfect great oh shoot I got to go to a meeting all right I got to go to a meeting but that's all right that's gonna chill down to cool down to room temperature while I'm at my being and I will be back in about about another hour I'm sorry I had a phone meeting that just has an interview with some some students at MIT who wanted to talk to me about no 4 that would have it they have a magazine called hackster chop or something like that a food magazine and MIT student and food magazine and they want attention reaping me that was fun and yeah back so the beets are now totally cool and totally cool and I've got my pine nuts in there I'm just gonna chop up some parsley I'm I don't know why I'm chopping this with a paring knife just because it's there toss that in there too parsley is great with beets tarragon also great with beets chervil is great with beets chives are great with beads dill is great with beets what's not great with beets I don't know there's a lot of things that are great with beets almost everything's better at a good beat to it all right now we get our lab name so what else am I gonna sing here oh maybe I'll stick in some of this onion actually this I'm not gonna use my paring knife here I need to Sonny I got this onion I need to kind of use up because it's been sitting there for a while I'm just gonna trim off the little bits that I've dried off that's that's a good amount a little bit more onion and citrus I red onion in citrus I think goes really well together Paulie Gee's in New York I'm my old friend Paulie G he he has a salad on his menu that's oranges and onions and parsley with some olive oil and it's delicious and that's like basically it oranges and onions it's really good anything that goes well with citrus goes well with beach yes that's looking good there let's get a plate for this I'm doing this guy so lovely as i showed you my love new video you really want to stir it up nice and good I'm gonna whip it this video we're gonna whip it and we're gonna beat it okay this guy's nice blob here do a little one of these thingies nice little landing spot for that beat what would also be excellent here is if you had some goat cheese and you whipped it up like that that would be great all right I'm gonna get my beets on do this the sloppy way some citrus in there I'm gonna fall where they may there's these beets all dude it'd be a little bit more neat with it you know I come from the last time I worked in a restaurant aside from my own the last my working like a fancy restaurant was the most pre tweezer days I think nobody's tweezers back then but now I feel like everybody uses tweezers his giant giant tweezers I just can't get used to him I like like the old-school spoon and fingers spoon and finger approach come on let's play my daughter watches tumble leaf which is an amazing show it's on Amazon Amazon Prime it's an amazing show animated kids show like puppet animation she watches town believe she doesn't like watching the opening introduce introduce of what she does sometimes as if she's in that room watching it and the intro comes on she'll come out of the room and search the house for either me or her mom and ask us to skip the intro and then of course by the time we get back to the room the intro is already done and it's exactly where she wants it to be so I guess I guess in a way her technique works she does miss the intro every time so I guess that's a good thing all right a little bit more olive oil let's do a little bit of fresh cracked pepper - and I think that is a pretty grand looking little salad we're gonna eat this with our pizza tonight I'm gonna try some what we're shopping I know you're gonna want some beets hmm it is grand I love beets I tell you I like beets because I love them I love them mmm beets have this quality that it it just can't be what is that word again mm-hmm you'll remember it soon you go shopping that's it oh right by your foot it just can't be I know what it is it just can't be [Music]

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 192,463

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Id: qo5EDHn5C_A

Length: 20min 25sec (1225 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020