March 29, 2026

Beets, Part 1

Lots of the Season 6 recipes depend on fresh produce, so for those I really want to wait until they’re in season. That won’t be long from now, so until then it looks like you can get beets pretty much year round. So, this is what I decided to tackle this weekend.

I bought a few bunches of smallish beets. Not baby ones, I didn’t see anything like that, but these ones were definitely way smaller than normal.

I started out by cutting the stems off, leaving just the beets and the greens. I set the beet roots aside for now, then sauteed up the greens along with some mushrooms to start the Beet Green Gratin The recipe was a little confusing, it said to use a pound of greens but a pound is a lot of greens. I wonder if he included the stems with that measure? I’m not sure, so I used 6.5oz of just the greens (after coarse stems were removed) and I roughly chopped them instead of keeping them whole (something else I wasn’t clear on via the recipe and episode). Since I used just 6.5oz of greens, I halved the recipe and put it all in a 1.5 quart baking dish.

I then covered it with crushed up gluten free crackers and baked for 30m, with the first 15 covered. I completely forgot to get a photo of the finished product, though. Anyway, reviews on this were mixed. Some of our guests (I know, as a general rule I don’t serve a recipe to guests that I’ve never done) completely loved it. One said that on a scale from 1 to 5 it was a 7! Personally, I thought it was just alright. I did have seconds though. Gemma didn’t like it at all. So, I took all of those ratings into consideration and called it a 3.

The next day, I turned to the roots to make some Glazed Baby Beets. I started by scrubbing them and trimming them down.

You can see that I didn’t really have baby beets, more like toddlers I guess. They were definitely way smaller than the huge beets you usually see, though. I put them into a large sauce pot in a single layer, then added the apricot juice. After 10m I added the honey and white balsamic. Ten minutes later some were done, but not all, so I gave it another ten minutes, which did the trick. At that point, there was still a ton of liquid in the pot, so I pulled the beets into a bowl and let the liquid cook down until it became a glaze-like consistency. I let them cool a bit and we ate them cut up in bowls, with a little extra glaze drizzled on top.

The first taste was good, but something was a little “weird” as Gemma described it. We decided to put them in a container and let them chill overnight so all the flavors could meld and get to know each other. The second day we pulled some out of the fridge, gave them about 30s in the microwave to take the chill off, and this time they were much better! Sweet and tangy, just how you’d expect beets to be.

Beet Green Gratin

• Crowd: 3/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Halved the recipe, used 6.5oz of greens after cutting the stems

Glazed Baby Beets

• Crowd: 4/5
• Ease: 3/5
• Used some beets that were small but not "baby"
• Needed to add another 10 minutes of cook time, then pulled the beets and cooked_on down the glaze for another 5 minutes or so