How to make zucchini and beetroot noodles

An irreplaceable ingredient for borscht and vinaigrette. But the culinary life of beets doesn't end there.

How to cook it correctly, how not to spoil it, how it can be combined into dishes - 5 Moscow chefs spoke about this.

Dmitry Shurshakov, brand chef of many restaurants:

“Tasty beets are rare. On our strip, the season starts in September. Harvesting beets early is like picking unripe apples or watermelons. Now the beets are still in the juice, they are delicious and sweet, but by the end of winter they will be soft, unpleasant and wrinkled.

Beets are great because they can be boiled, baked, fried, and many other things. I really like the grilled beetroot salad with goat cheese. I make one at Seven: 30g stew beets, 80g roast beets, 15g goat cheese, quinoa, avocado, mint, pomegranate, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar.

I also add lightly roasted beets to my red cabbage salad. It turned out to be no ordinary cabbage salad. There is also black currant, salt, sugar and balsamic vinegar. Beets usually go well with blackcurrants. And I made beet gazpacho with black currant.

Beets go well with chocolate, especially black and bitter chocolate. Beets go well with chia and quinoa. She is very plastic. Once upon a time I loved making beetroot cream like hummus.

Beets marinate wonderfully because they absorb acids well. Her simplest marinade for her is salt, sugar, and vinegar, including balsamic, grapes, raspberry, and sherry. Then experiment. For example, you can make an Asian marinade with sesame seeds and ginger.

The main thing is not to overcook the beets. Do not overcook or bake. Then it turns brown and becomes disgusting. In my practice I've only found its downsides, but as long as the beat is good, I like everything. "

Chef Artem Terekhov at Fresh Cafe:

To do this, you need to bake them at a temperature of 170 degrees for about an hour. (You can also make them in the form of sous, so much more useful, as all the useful juices remain together. Then the roasted beets can be served cold or hot.I like to serve it with ricotta and lingonberry jam.I wedge the beets, sprinkle a little lingonberry jam on top and rub the smoked ricotta. Also think of cooking beetroot with pears, chop both and pour eg maple syrup on top, maybe only pears should be sweeter and denser.

Many people love beets as a color and use them as natural dyes. For example, beet juice can be used to color ice cream. The colors are very bright.

Beetroot makes for a fun dessert, but without a lot of sugar and you need to add syrup or honey. I love this: I cut the tops off the beets, remove the cores, put the nuts and honey inside and send them to bake. You can eat all types of nuts, including walnuts, hazelnuts, nut mixtures, and pumpkin seeds. Cover all this with the cuts, wrap in foil and bake at 180 degrees for 40-50 minutes.

Bits make good chips too. Cut into thin slices, sprinkle with salt and sugar at the same time, and bake until crispy.

But I do not recommend boiling and digesting beets. During cooking, it loses all its useful properties and original color, the taste changes and the sweetness disappears. The longer you cook, the more value is lost. "

Chef Mamiya Jojua of Kazbek Restaurant:

“I will teach you how to cook Parley. We can add a pound of beets, 1 kg of beet tops, 300 g of walnuts, 200 g of onion, 1 g of coriander, 2 g of utskho-suneli, Imeretian saffron. salt and pepper to taste.

To prevent the tops of beets from changing color, they should be boiled in salted water with baking soda added. Fill a 7 liter saucepan less than half full with water and add 1 tsp baking soda and 1 tbsp salt. When boiling, pour over the top. It is not necessary to cook the leaves for up to 5 minutes. When the leaves begin to soften, the tops should be placed in ice water and then excess liquid should be squeezed out.

Cook the beets separately. When choosing beets in a store or market, make sure they have a distinctive burgundy color. And sometimes she is pale - we don't need it.

Crank the cooled boiled tops and boiled beets through a meat grinder. Scroll the nuts even in a meat grinder, but go through a fine mesh. Boil the onion and let it cool, then add the rest of the ingredients and stir. You can add a spoonful of white wine vinegar at the end, but this is also a taster. Then you need to make a ball out of this mass. Here it is. "

Glen Ballis, brand chef of many restaurants:

“When I arrived in Moscow, it turned out that I did not know how to work with beets. How it happened: Ivan Shishkin (brand-chef of the Delicatessen restaurant. - Ed. ) Tasted my beets and said that I was cooking them incorrectly. I thought about this for a week and finally came up with: I began to slowly bake it on salt at a not very high temperature. And then I myself really liked both the taste and the texture that it acquired: the beets seem to be caramelized inside. You can bake it in a different way: add garlic, thyme, butter or olive oil, wrap it in foil - and in the oven.

There are classic combinations like beetroot, goat cheese and orange, but in general, this is a vegetable that can be paired with anything, depending on how you cook it. It can be served with fish - but then you need al dente beets, which are almost raw. In general, I love raw beets, now I am working on a dish of raw beets with truffles and hazelnuts. I add beet juice to risotto, but it's also good in sauces and dressings.

I also really love beet tops: I make pasta with it and add pickled to salads. And at our Remy Kitchen Bakery, it's served with a shoulder of lamb and sweet potatoes. "

Elena Nikiforova, chef of the Shinok restaurant:

“There are many varieties of beets, we use“ Egyptian ”and“ Cylinder ”, they are the darkest. Beets are generally different - orange, purple, which are as valuable as ordinary beets, but they just do not give color and their taste is also less sweet. The darker the beets, the sweeter. How to choose it correctly? You need to take raw beets and cut them in half across. If we see white or pink circles, then we do not put this in the borscht, it tastes like a feed. But if everything inside the beets is homogeneous and dark, then it is good.

In order for the beets to open correctly in the borscht, you need to do the following. Put chopped beets in a hot frying pan with hot vegetable oil. When it starts to stick together a little, this means that pectin has begun to be released from it and excess moisture has left. Then you need to add tomato paste to the pan - at a time when the beets have not yet cooked, but excess moisture has left it. Not later - otherwise we will not be able to preserve the structure of the vegetable and it will be too soft in the soup.

Having combined the beets and pasta, we do not leave the stove and stir them until they acquire the consistency of jam. Everything must be sautéed to the end, so that there is no longer the aroma of fresh pasta or fresh beets, so that the aroma of toasted vegetables appears. The beets will not lose their color, because the acidic environment, that is, tomato paste, will fix it. The taste of this dressing should be sweet and sour, and it will be passed on to the borscht.

It is very good to make cold caviar from beets. We prepared it in "Shinka" for the post. The beets are first sauteed in the same way as for borscht, but then, when pectin is released from it and it sticks together, squeezed, finely chopped pickled cucumber and fried onions are added to it. It turns out a thick mass, which, when it cools down, we put in cups of filo dough and serve with sour cream.

Beets go well with mushrooms. Saute it in the same way until that very moment - and add fried mushrooms with onions to it. It is good as a side dish both cold and hot. You can even fill it with sour cream.

We also pickle the beets: cut, add apple cider vinegar, balsamic vinegar, cream balsamic, red onion. This pickled beet is great in salad and is good as a side dish for meat.

The only thing to remember is that you need to know how to cook beets. If you weld it incorrectly, you will easily ruin it. There are varieties that taste like earth and dust. To get rid of this, we do this. Before boiling, we clean the beets, add sugar and lemon concentrate or crystalline citric acid to the water - and with this set, we cook it for 25-30 minutes from the moment of boiling, and then infuse. In this brine, it can be stored in the refrigerator for a week or two. The proportions are as follows: for six beets covered with water, I put five tablespoons of sugar top, and half a teaspoon of citric acid. "