This beet salad recipe turns to a secret weapon the microwave
Beets can be so divisive. Some people love them. And other people are wrong.
For a long time, I was persuaded by the notion that the latter were good, well-intentioned folks who were just scarred from being force-fed the canned version when they were young. And I’ll admit, that isn’t the best way to eat beets, but even they aren’t bad.
Honestly, we should have evolved beyond that by now. Remember the 1990s, when every restaurant was required to have a beet-and-goat-cheese salad on its menu? Sure, it got boring after about 10 years, but that wasn’t the beets’ fault. That salad became ubiquitous because it was delicious. And if you don’t remember the ’90s, then you’re too young to have been exposed to those cans of beets in the first place. For as long as you’ve been aware, fresh, earthy, roasted roots have been the default.
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I love them, which the careful reader might have discerned from my general tone. I was fine with the canned or pickled versions I had when I was a kid, but they became one of my favorite things when I started roasting them. Regular red ones were great, but I remember having to drive to five supermarkets to find one the gold ones. I hunted them down like they were actual gold. Then I learned about the candy cane variety — chioggia — and it was just a flat-out quest to find those.
So I would eat any kind of beet, but my cooking method was nearly exclusive: Crank the oven to 400, cover them in oil and salt them, then wrap them in foil and let them roast for an hour. Sometimes I would roast my beets without knowing what I was going to do with them next.
Imagine my emotional roller coaster when I came across a recipe for a beet and arugula salad in the new America’s Test Kitchen cookbook “Vegan Cooking for Two,” only to quickly realize that the beets were — it’s still weird to type this — microwaved? My initial high (Nostalgia! Delight! Intense interest!) quickly deflated (Confusion! Shock! Intense skepticism!).
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I turned the page. I was kind of offended. But then I went back. At first I considered making the salad but roasting the beets instead. I would then use this space to preach about how superior that method is and declare that we shouldn’t expose innocent beets to such a harsh cooking method. Then I decided that wasn’t fair. So here’s what I did:
I did my normal roasting ritual, and while those beets were in the oven, I peeled and diced another batch and nuked them, just the way the book said.
Despite the fact that I started cooking the roasted ones before the microwaved version, the latter were not only done first, they were nicely cool before the roasted ones were ready. But surely I’d find that roasting was worth that extra time!
It was not. Side by side, it pains me to admit, both of them were equally delicious on top of this bed of arugula with a spiced yogurt.
Microwaving probably will not become my new go-to method for cooking beets, because like those people who won’t eat beets at all, I’m entrenched. But I’m going to remember it. And I’ll probably do it again sometime if I need them cooked quickly.
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