Local Golden Beets are Delicious in Salads

Golden beets are a relatively recent variation of the old root vegetable that can be traced back several centuries to the Mediterranean. They are a year round crop, but for some reason I am just now noticing them at local markets.

I have never been a beet lover, but the summer salad muse has ahold of me. Looking at the golden beets at the Route 1 Farms stand and Live Earth Farm stand, I couldn’t help but envision them cold, in a beautiful salad. 

“The cool thing about golden beets is that they don’t bleed when you cook them,” said Jeff Larkey, owner of Route 1 Farms. Larkey says, aesthetically speaking, that this is a prime salad-ingredient quality, especially when red beets turn anything in the same bowl as them bright magenta or purple.

Sold. With a bright orange beet salad forming in my mind, I purchased one bunch of Larkey’s goldens for a few bucks and took them home to experiment with. 

Roasting and steaming beets is said to keep the most of that sweet, earthy flavor, so I tried roasting them in some olive oil and garlic. This proved to be a tasty method, although the skin was harder to remove, which is something you may want to do since it carries a bitter after taste. 

Not having a steamer on hand, my friend and I decided to do it like our moms used to and boil them until they were easily pierced with a fork. I was delighted to find that after boiling them and rinsing in cold water the skin slid right off.

After trying out some combinations, I learned that golden beets happen to be delicious served cold with goat cheese, sweet onion and a light red wine or balsamic vinegar dressing. 

Taylor Brady of Live Earth Farm is also a fan of golden beets as a salad ingredient.

“I actually love to just grate them raw on top of a green salad with toasted pumpkin seeds,” Brady said. She also suggests sauteeing them with green garlic.

I would have just tossed the beet tops, but Larkey informed me that they were edible, and tastier than spinach when cooked. We heeded his advice and sauteed the bundle of beet greens with olive oil and green garlic.

They shrunk down into a very delicious (and strangely salty without adding any salt) little stir fry, which paired well with baby portabellos. Apparently the beet greens are even more nutritious than the beets themselves.

Golden, red, and Chioggia beets will be available all summer long at local markets, and they won’t be traveling far from the fields to your dinner plate—Route 1 Farms grows them off of Ocean Street on its warmest plot of farm land, and Live Earth Farm grows in Watsonville.

A Note About Beets in the Conventional Agriculture Industry:

Although golden beet seeds are pretty expensive to buy, they are available in seed form, but be sure not to purchase genetically modified seeds. Sugar beets especially are surrounded by the genetically modified organism controversy, since the USDA approved a new modified crop that is resistant to Round Up weed killer.

The United States gets most of its sugar from its sugar beet crops, and there is speculation as to how healthy the genetically modified food is for our bodies as well as our natural crops.

“We feel that genetically engineered varieties have been insufficiently tested prior to public release,” Larkey states on his website.