My Ugly Delicious Journey- The dreaded Beet!
I think most humans go through a similar relationship with the multifaceted Beetroot. The red root that is bright pink, and makes you question if it's edible or not. At first, I never enjoyed it. But then again growing up in Japan, I would never find it in an average supermarket. It was only during my time in India where I encountered it in my diet in the form of a sabzi (a vegetable sautee seasoned with a variety of spices). Even then, I would never voluntarily chose that dish if I had an option.
However, as I grew older, and my palette more refined, I grew to appreciate it a lot more. The sweet and soft texture giving way to its malleability to become everything from a sweet dessert to a tart yogurt dish, to a salad (my favorite is the Russian salad by my dear friend Gana), and of course a flavourful sabzi dish.
What I thought was the worst, became the best feature of the beetroot.
The beautifully bright pink colour!
I never realised how much you could play around with the colour pink to enhance the way you experience a dish.
Apart from all its qualities of colour and flavour, nutritionally speaking, they are jampacked with vitamins, fibres, and essential minerals like potassium, and iron.
So… why am I ranting about how amazing the beetroot is?
Over the spring holidays (Golden Week) in Japan, we were advised by the local municipality to run a pop up food stall catered towards tourists visiting Showa-no-Machi (Showa era town).
THE MISSION: Create a menu that embodies the showa era cuisine using seasonal vegetables.
The Showa era was between 1926–1989 and was an age of great transformation where the influences from outside of Japan (mostly from the USA)in terms of food, fashion, and culture. Some staple food influences, during this time, was the Japanese curry ( most likely influenced by the Indian curry), the Neapolitan pasta, and cream sodas/ soda pops (most likely influenced by American diner food).
Since the concept of our project is “the discovery of vegetables”(sounds a little better in Japanese…「野菜の発見」yasai-no-hakken), we had to somehow integrate the Showa era food choices with that of seasonal vegetables, and come up with a surprising yet delicious way to eat these staple dishes. The aim of it all is to get people interested in eating and cooking conventional to rare vegetables in to try to integrate them into their daily lives.
So, the beet was a great canvas to start this experiment. Out of all the Showa era foods, the Neopolitan pasta was the perfect start.
The Neopolitan pasta is a classic in Japanese home cooking, primarily catered towards children. The dish uses ketchup as the sauce base, and it tends to come with sauteed green capsicum, carrots, and sausages. Simple, yet delicious.
My first thought process was, perhaps I could use the sweetness and earthiness of the beet to complement the sweet and tart nature of ketchup and blended it with pure tomato sauce. Balanced the flavors with salt, a splatter of herbs, and garlic to pump up the aromatics, and voila, a pink sauce, ready to turn into pasta. So in other words mission accomplished.
For the Japanese population, there was definitely a hurdle to try out pink pasta, but almost all who got a bit of it came back for more! ;)
This dish is a perfect way to sneak beetroot, an unfamiliar yet nutritious vegetable, into the standard Japanese household. It’s the perfect Trojan horse! Feel free to try this dish at home! The not so recipe-recipe is written out below. Bon Apetite~!
Key ingredients
- Beet (after boiling them, put them in the blender to create s sauce)
- Diced tomatoes
- Ketchup
- onions
- garlic
- aromatic herbs (Rosemary, Basil, parsley etc. )
- any other cut vegetables/ sausages to enhance the colour, but sometimes keeping it simple helps you experience the true taste of beetroot better.
Keep sauteing in a frying pan and mixing the ingredients until perfection for your palate.
Salt
- normal salt/ garlic salt, herb salt, or any variation of flavored salt
Fat
- A generous amount of olive oil is used as its base.
Acid
- A combination of cut tomatoes, and ketchup.
Heat
- Slowly sautee all the ingredients together until they blend into one beautifully
