Borscht No. 1

Admit it. This is what you've been waiting for. Borscht! Beautiful, filling, delightful borscht: the Monarch of Soups.

Er, okay...maybe not. But it is delicious.

Borscht No. 1

                                                        Yield: 6 - 8 servings

This borscht requires the use of black garlic which lends a somewhat beefy flavour to the broth.

Borscht with soured cream

Ingredients:

4 small beets, about 3 - 5 cm. (1.5 - 2") in diameter

1 carrot

1 medium-sized red potato

1/2 cup red onion, diced

1 cup grated purple cabbage

2 cloves black garlic, finely chopped

4 sprigs fresh dill

3 - 5 cups chicken stock or water from steaming vegatables

1 tablespoon red wine vinegar or lemon juice

freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup commercial soured cream

Beets, carrot, potato, black garlic and purple cabbage

Preparation:

1. Thoroughly scrub beets, potato and carrot under running water to remove sand and debris. Remove any wilted or discoloured tops and roots. Place whole beets in the basket of a food steamer or pressure cooker. Steam vegetables. If using a pressure cooker, follow the user manual. Otherwise, when a fork can easily pierce a beet to the centre, turn heat off. Remove vegetables to a heat-proof container and set aside to cool. Reserve fluid from steamer to use in this borscht preparation, or else store for later use.

Steam rises off the beets, carrot
 and potato cooked in a pressure cooker

2. When beets, potato and carrot are cool enough to handle, slip the peels away. Dice. Reserve. 

Diced beets, carrot and potato

3. Place peeled and diced red onion in the soup pot together with diced black garlic, whole sprigs of dill and 3 cups of chicken stock (or the liquid of your choice). cover. Bring to boil, then reduce heat to simmer for 5 minutes.

Black garlic and fresh dill

4.  Add diced beets, potato and carrot. Bring to boil, then reduce heat to simmer for 5 minutes to enable flavours to mingle.

5. Add grated purple cabbage. Raise to boiling point, then reduce heat to simmer for 10 minutes.

Purple cabbage cooking in the beet mixture

6. Remove from heat. Add freshly ground black pepper to your taste. Add red wine vinegar or lemon juice. Stir.

7. Ladle into bowls. Top each bowl of borscht with a tablespoon of soured cream.

You will want second servings. 

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Cooking beets in a pressure cooker - Part 2

What have I learned about cooking beets and other root vegetables in a pressure cooker?

Steam rises from beets, a carrot and a potato cooked in a pressure cooker

For the beginning of this post, see Cooking beets in a pressure cooker - Part 1

First: The lid cannot blow off. 

Second: The way the steam emerges, it bursts out in four directions rather than in one, so the steam is dissipated in a less dangerous and more effective manner that it was in the monster from the deep. 

Third: There is a steam-controlled metal stop that prevents the lid being opened before the pressure inside has reduced to a predetermined safe level.

Fourth: One is advised against cooking chick peas and such legumes in a pressure cooker. However, it can be done safely if certain precautions are taken. There is no danger of blowing up the kitchen.

Fifth: The modern pressure cooker is not the dangerous contraption that the old ones were and (yahoo!) there is no longer a pressure gauge.

This latest addition to my kitchen arsenal is rather larger than it ought to be for the cooking I undertake. It should really be only 3 - 5 quarts in size for my needs. This one holds more like 8 - 10 quarts. In the shop, it didn't look so large but, now that it is home in my postage-stamp-sized kitchen, it looks huge.

Cooking beets and root vegetables in the pressure cooker is safe and easy if the instructions for safe handling are followed.

Following is the process I used to cook beets, a potato and a carrot for later use in making borscht.

1. Wash the vegetables. Place them in the pressure cooker. Add water just sufficient to cover the vegetables. In this case, that was 6 cups of water.

2. Following the user manual, attach the lid and turn it to lock it in position.

3. Place the pressure cooker on the stove and turn the heat element or burner control to 'High.' Leave it on 'High' for 8 - 10 minutes, during which time the water inside will have reached boiling point and steam will have begun to be emitted from the pressure release valve. This is when a steam vent cap is placed upon the pressure release valve. Through this vent cap, steam is emitted in four directions rather than one, as was the case long ago.

4. Reduce the heat to 'Medium' for 6 - 8 minutes.

5. Turn off the heat. Remove the pressure cooker to an unheated element. Leave to sit until the steam-controlled metal stop is heard to drop down with a metallic 'thunk' sound. 

6. Remove the lid. Remove the vegetables to a heat-proof container. Decant the liquid to another heat-proof container. In this case, there were 4¼ cups of liquid remaining in the pressure cooker at the end of cooking.

And that's that. Finished. Caput. Finito.

Lessons learned

The pot was left scarred by the vegetables that were cooked in it.



I'm guessing this is avoidable if a steamer basket is used. In addition, I am not keen on boiled food, preferring it steamed instead. So next time I fire up the pressure cooker, I plan to try using a steamer basket insider.

This is a wee steamer basket found years ago on Spadina (Toronto) in a shop owned and patronized by mainly Chinese customers.

The steamer basket fits perfectly inside the pot.

I will use 4 cups of water in the pressure cooker rather than 6 cups, and the basket should shield the vegetables from the water, yielding steamed rather than boiled vegetables.

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Cooking beets in a pressure cooker - Part 1

Using a pressure cooker has become almost fashionable in some demographics. You know: being eco-friendly and green, and saving the world. For others, it's a necessity.

My shining new pressure cooker

Three factors prevented me using a pressure cooker for all my years until now. 

First, it never occurred to me to want to use one. 

Second, when a thought concerning a pressure cooker flitted through my mind, what was recalled was an enormous, heavy, metal vat used by one of my aunts at harvest time when she was preserving food from her garden. It had a cogged lid with a gauge (or gauges) on it and there were other protruding things that made it look like something from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. I was made to know that this cooking vessel was DANGEROUS!!!

This leads to the third factor that stopped me using a pressure cooker: the fear factor. Yes. FEAR.

And it's no wonder that I harboured the fear. I had it drilled into me that the steam which screamed and hissed and spit its way out of the contraption could take my skin RIGHT OFF! And the pressure inside could make it BLOW UP! The lid could fly off and hot peas would explode out of it like BULLETS and take my EYES OUT! And so, if I knew what was good for me, I'd make myself scarce.

Recently (i.e., in the last couple of years), Enmax -- the energy company that we, the citizens of Calgary, are supposed to own -- has been extorting money from me at a rate and volume that is more Mafioso than the Mafia. Of course, Enmax needs to put the screws on customers in order to hand over huge wads of money to the snouts in the trough who do nothing but use our money to pay rock stars to entertain at their homes. Oh, yes, -- and they dream up weird surcharges to attach to the bills they churn out for us. For instance, a charge is added to the bill for compiling the bill, and then that grand theft is topped off with the stealer tax, adding insult to injury.

Having surveyed the grounds, you can tell where this is leading.

Because I am a low energy user and still am suffering crazily escalating energy bills, investigation of more energy-efficient ways to cook is in order. Since beets take a substantial amount of time to cook, especially when cooked whole as I prefer, one alternative to steaming or roasting that came to mind was the monster from the deep. As luck would have it, I saw one advertised by a national retailer, and it was at a discounted price. 

Just as I was about to make the leap into pressure cooker ownership, a colleague told me that another colleague had a disastrous  experience with her pressure cooker. She said that the pot had exploded because pressure couldn't be released. This had destroyed the kitchen stove and the kitchen.That put me off. It didn't take much.

Some weeks later, after talking to the horse rather than the horse's backside, I discovered:
 (a) that  the source of the problem had been that chick peas were being cooked in the pressure cooker, which clogged the steam vent(s), and
 (b) the disaster had occurred forty years ago in India when, of course, the old monster from the deep was in use.

Whew!

Now that I knew the folly of believing the alarmist rantings of an uniformed, or partially informed, gossip, I was again enamoured by the lure of shortened cooking times. And, just then, I again came across a pressure cooker offered at a reduced price by a national retailer.

Reader, I bought it.

Continued in …

Cooking beets (and other root vegetables) using a pressure cooker - Part 2

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Beet and pumpkin soup with shrimp

This beet soup has Asian leanings which are easily identified by the use of lemon grass, ginger, oyster sauce and (optional) Madras curry powder. There is a bit of heat in it but it is ameliorated by the coconut milk. This beet and pumpkin soup is a meal in itself when accompanied by a sour dough, old-fashioned rye, or whole wheat bread.

Beet, pumpkin, parsley, ginger, lemon grass, and coconut milk

This beet soup recipe requires a slow cooker and a blender. 

                                                                               Yield: 4 small or 2 large servings

Ingredients: (all quantities are approximate)

3 cups of frozen chopped pumpkin

1 beet

1 cup coconut milk

1 cup beet stock or chicken stock

1/2 teaspoon oyster sauce

1teaspoon finely chopped frozen lemon grass 

or 1 stalk fresh lemon grass, roughly  chopped

9 thin slices fresh ginger

4 - 5 sprigs of freeze-dried or fresh parsley, whole

¼ teaspoon brown sugar, packed

24 - 48 frozen, cooked shrimp, shelled, deveined

½ teaspoon Madras curry powder (optional)

Preparation:

1. Place chopped pumpkin into slow cooker. Set slow cooker on the "High" setting. 

2. Thoroughly scrub beet under running water. Peel. Chop into a small dice and add to pumpkin.

3. If fresh lemon grass is used, bruise and chop it into 5 cm. (2 in.) lengths, then add to the beet and pumpkin mixture. Otherwise, add sufficient frozen lemon grass to equal approximately 1 teaspoon.

4. Peel and finely slice ginger. Add to slow cooker along with coconut milk, stock, oyster sauce parsley and brown sugar. If using curry powder, now is the time to add it. Stir. Cover and leave to cook for about 2 hours, then reduce the heat to low for another hour.

Chopped beet and vegetables in coconut milk

5.  If fresh lemon grass was used, now is the time to fish out the chunks. Discard them. Either transfer the contents of of the slow cooker to a blender or use an electric hand-held blender stick to blend the contents into a thin puree. Return the puree to the slow cooker to reheat and keep it hot.

6. Defrost the shrimp.

7. Ladle the steaming soup into bowls and add ¼ or ½ of the defrosted shrimp to each bowl.

Beet and pumpkin soup with shrimp

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The nutritional value of beets: Part 3 - Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load

Beets are an excellent source of complex carbohydrates and they are high in fibre, making them a valuable addition to a healthy, nutritious diet. But what about their scary GI?

Beets, the GI Cinderella

For the purpose of the Glycemic Index (GI), warnings have been forthcoming that beets are high in sugar and should be avoided. It is true that when we examine the bare facts (provided by the USDA National Nutrient database), the data look scary.

Principle	Nutrient value	Percentage of RDA
Energy	45 cal	2%
Carbohydrates	9.56 g	7%
Protein	1.61 g	1%
Total fat	0.17 g	0.5%
Cholesterol	0 mg	0%
Dietary fibre	2.8 g	7%
Sugars	6.76 g

Really? That many calories in 100 grams (about half a cup) of raw beets? That much sugar?

When we examine the data above, we find that the combined totals of dietary fibre and of sugar are equal to the total of carbohydrates. We need to examine what those quantities signify and, when we do, we'll discover that beets have been victims of bad press because the real story is all about good stuff, i.e., complex carbohydrates and dietary fibre, not about sugar.

But first, we need to wrap our heads around two terms: Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load.

(1) Glycemic Index (GI): This is a measure, on a numerical scale, of the rate at which blood sugar level is elevated when a food is consumed. 

There are two types of GI. One, the original, is based upon the consumption of glucose, a simple carbohydrate. The GI value of glucose = 100. The second is based upon the consumption of white bread. Eating this starch, which is another simple carbohydrate and which is made of refined white flour, elevates the blood sugar level even more quickly than does taking glucose. The GI value given to white bread is also 100. 

This makes the GI confusing because one really must know which food is the base measure before the GI value can be meaningful. Frequently, no indication of the base food is given when GI is discussed. For us at this juncture, it is sufficient to know that a food's GI is measured against one of these carbohydrate standards and that the higher the GI is the more quickly blood sugar levels will be elevated.That's the theory, anyway.

Using the GI standard based upon glucose, beets (the roots, raw and fresh) rate a GI of 64. That's scariness of the moderate to high kind.

But there's something else one needs to know before relegating beets to the Off-Limits Fat-Blob No-No Bin along with the chocolate cake, doughnuts, deep-fried chicken, and ice cream, and that is the Glycemic Load.

(2) Glycemic Load (GL): This is the measure, again on a numerical scale, of carbohydrate in a quantity of food. There are three categories of GL: high, medium, and low.

High = 20 or greater

Medium = 11 - 19

Low = 10 or less

While beets have a high GI (64), they have a GL of 5, which is low. 

Why is this true? It is because, while the carbohydrate value of ½ cup of raw beets is 9.56 g., and that carbohydrate has a high GI, there isn't much of it in beets. Why? Because beets are high in dietary fibre.

When ingesting the bare GI and GL facts, we need to take into account other facts behind these data. And the most telling facts we need to know are:

(a) the more complex the carbohydrate's structure is, the more difficult or impossible it is to digest.

(b)  dietary fibre is carbohydrate composed of sugar attached to other molecules in complex structures that are impossible to digest.

Therefore, although beets are high in sugar, a significant quantity of that sugar cannot be released into our blood system because it is locked into indigestible dietary fibre. 

This makes the health benefits of beets fairly obvious, and it shoos away the scariness of the bad press that beets have received.

See also:

Nutritional value of beets - Part 1

Nutritional value of beets - Part 2 

Nutritional value of beets - Part 4

Nutritional value of beets - Part 5

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The nutritional value of beets - Part 2

 Phyto-nutrients: betaine

Beets, the original source of betaine

In the USDA National Nutrient database it is found that 100 g. (about ½ cup) of fresh, raw beet root contains a generous amount of betaine: , 128.7 mg.

Why should you care? What's in it for you? And what is betaine anyhow? 

Betaine was first identified in sugar beets in the 1800s. It is an amino acid. The betaine about which I write, i.e., the one found in beets (often called beet root or red beets) is now usually called glycine betaine to distinguish it from all the other betaines subsequently found in other sources. For this article, I'm sticking with 'betaine' just to simplify matters.

The proper name of the betaine found in beets is trimethylglycine, indicating that it is formed of three methyl groups plus a sugar. It functions by donating a methyl group to another molecule during biosynthesis processes in our bodies, thereby becoming dimethylglycine.

Betaine is a critical factor enabling fundamental processes to function in our brains, processes that include the synthesis of neurotransmitters such as melatonin, dopamine and serotonin. Melatonin helps us to sleep. Dopamine, which is released from the hypothalamus, is an important regulator of basic biological needs. It is present in those areas of the brain that are related to motion, emotion and motivation; dopamine is believed to be essential to learning and behavioural adaptation. At the cellular level, serotonin helps wounds to heal and, in the nervous system, it creates feelings of well-being; it is sometimes called the 'happiness hormone.' These characteristics in themselves substantiate the elevated nutritional value of beets.

But wait. There's more.

Betaine also is active in our organs, specifically in the kidneys and liver where it enables the mobilization of fats. This is useful in the treatment of a condition that is known as fatty liver, a liver disease that is common to alcoholics (and those who aren't but who simply imbibe too much booze).

You're teetotal? Betaine will help you in other ways.

Betaine protects cells, enzymes, and proteins against damage from what might best be called environmental system conditions, such as too much salt, extremes of temperature, and too little water.

The health benefits of beets were indicated by a report on betaines in the journal of the American Society for Nutritional Sciences (133:1291-1295, May 2003) which documented the efficacy with which betaines inhibit inflammatory responses that can lead to heart, liver and vascular disease.

And that's why you should care.

Eat beets. Drink beet juice. And be merry.

See the following posts for more information on the health benefits of beets:

Nutritional value of beets - Part 1

Nutritional value of beets - Part 3

Nutritional value of beets - Part 4

Nutritional value of beets - Part 5

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The nutritional value of beets : Part 1- Beets, fresh, raw

Here is where I get up on my soapbox to begin a discussion of the nutritional value of beets: the good stuff, the bad stuff, the right stuff and the just plain wrong stuff that has been published and/or believed about beets. 

Beets: fresh, raw, velvety, and full of goodness

 A chart of the common factors that are measured in food laboratories is a useful tool at this juncture. I chose to use the United States Food and Drug Agency (FDA) Nutritional Nutrient database, a source which is easily accessed and to which common reference can be made.

From this data, we observe that beets are found to have nutritional values that are generous in folates, manganese and Vitamin C, and in carbohydrates and dietary fibre, as well as the phytonutrients Carotene-B and Betaine. In future posts, these factors and related subjects will be explored.

Another source, the IFAfitness.com book ( http://www.ifafitness.com/book/USDA-RDA.htm ), has been used for the percentage of Recommended Daily Allowances (RDA-RDI), for additional information.  It is as accurate as I could manage to find at this time.

Data in the IFA tables are categorised by age and gender. These data listed below are for adult females (generalised). For adult males (generalised ), the percentages of RDA (not listed here) are lower. The RDA for some elements is not available simply because either I haven't located a reliable source or there is no published general agreement upon what that allowance should be. For precise data, please visit the IFA site and check the entries for your gender and age. 

Beets (beta vulgaris) 

Nutritional value per 100g (approximately ½ cup) of fresh, raw beet root

Source: USDA National Nutrient database

Principle	Nutrient value	Percentage of RDA*
Energy	43 kcal	2
Carbohydrates	9.56 g	7
Protein	1.61 g	1
Total fat	0.17 g	0.5
Cholesterol	0 mg	0
Dietary fibre	2.8 g	7
Sugars	6.76 g
Vitamins
Folates	109 mcg	27
Niacin	0.334 mg	2
Pantothenic acid	0.155 mg	3
Pyridoxine	0.067 mg	5
Thiamin	0.031 mg	2.5
Riboflavin	0.040 mg	4
Vitamin A	33 IU	1
Vitamin C	4.9 mg	8
Vitamin E	0.04 mg	0.5
Vitamin K	0.2 mcg	0
Electrolytes
Sodium	78 mg	5
Potassium	325 mg	7
Minerals
Calcium	16 mg	1.5
Copper	0.075 mg	8
Iron	0.80 mg	10
Magnesium	23 mg	6
Manganese	0.329 mg	14
Phosphorous, P	40 mg
Zinc	0.35 mg	3%
Phyto-nutrients
Carotene-B	20 mcg	- -
Betaine	128.7 mg	- -

*RDA : Recommended Daily Allowance

See the following posts for more information on the health benefits of beets:

Nutritional value of beets - Part 2 

Nutritional value of beets - Part 3

Nutritional value of beets - Part 4

Nutritional value of beets - Part 5

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