I played with beets last week.
I had a sudden craving for beets. I found that a little strange, because I'd never craved beets before. I crave all kinds of rice cakes at all times. I can eat ice cream at any give moment. But beets?
I didn't grow up eating beets because they were not available in Korea when I was growning up (now the red ones are). I can't really remember when I first tasted beets, but I imagine it was an item in a salad bar. Yes, it was that memorable.
I began to appreciate beets when I started really cooking. The stubborn, hard raw beets were good to practice peeling with a knife (faster, smoother, prettier... although not ever quite getting there). Roasting in the oven wrapped in foil made them all soft and easy to peel. Just wrap in paper towel and give a gentle rub, and that stubborn skin is gone. And how sweet they are! More than anything, I enjoyed the bright colors of red and yellow (and sometimes candied, they look pretty but slightly bitter) in the midst of winter.
Maybe I craved the sweet colors more. I made a trip to Chelsea Market and got myself a bunch of baby red beets and 2 yellow roots (no good bunches on the baby yellow).
I washed the roots and cut the yellow ones in half to make them cook at about the same time. Toss in oil, sprinkle salt, wrap in aluminum foil, then in the 350 F degree oven for an hour. Poked each one with a cake tester, oh-so-soft, done. While the roots are still warm, wrap them in paper towel and gently rub to peel the skin. If you don't want red color steeping into yellow beets, you should separate them into two foil wraps before cooking. It didn't matter to me.
While the roots were roasting, greens were... just there. My go-to option for vegetables I don't know what to do with is making a pancake (전 - jeon) out of it. So I did. It was crispy outside, the greens were soft, and it really smelled like beets. Can you tell I didn't even have enough batter for the greens? Beet green pancake is a definite possibility, but I can make it better next time.
I peeled the beets, cut to dice, then what? Last Sunday was a Korean holiday celebrating the first full moon of the year, so I had already made tri-colored vegetable set (삼색 나물 - sam saek na mul). The assorted vegetables - mung bean sprouts (white), garland chrysanthemum (green), and chwinamul (dark brown), plus the red and yellow beets - became my own special bibimbap on top of brown rice.
I still had beets left after bibimbap. By this point, I realized I was craving to cook beets as much as I wanted to eat them.
So obviously (?!), I made beet rice cake with the leftover. I'd call this a beomuri (버무리) in the category of Korean rice cakes. To me, beomuri is something so casual - basically toss in rice flour, sugar and water then steam until done - with no focus on visual appeal, it seemed good to try when I was feeling lazy but still wanted to play.
But the beets themselves already took care of the visual part. Their bright colors came through in different light before and after cooking. I'd never had beet rice cake. I've used red beet juice in rice cakes for its bright color (which usually turns into soft, baby pink when cooked), but not as a main ingredient.
The taste? I'm still deciding. It was good in a sense it was a nice mix of sweetness of beets and sugar. It's also sticky and pleasantly chewy. But my mind still seems to be confused about this new experience. If anyone wants to try this, let me know what you think.
Beet Beomuri (비트 버무리)
INGREDIENTS:
1 C Frozen rice powder (냉동 쌀가루 - naeng dong ssal ga ru)
1 C Beet, cooked, peeled & cut to small dice
1 ~ 2 T Water
2 T Sugar
1/4 t Salt
DIRECTIONS:
1. Leave the frozen rice flour at room temperature for easier handling. In the meantime, set up a steamer. Line the steamer with a liner or wet towel on the bottom. You can put the dough directly in the lined steamer. For a better shape, a cake pan with a removable bottom works well. Place a cake pan, with its bottom removed, in a steamer. Alternatively, you can use silicon muffin cups or paper cups with no wax coating inside.
2. Break up lumps in rice flour with a fork or your fingers.
3. Mix in sugar and salt thoroughly in rice flour. Mix in beets with the rice flour mix. Add water 1 tablespoon at a time to make everything stick together, to a consistency of a coarse dough.
4. Scoop the mix gently into the cake mold placed in the steamer (as in picture above), or into silicon muffin cups or paper cups. Do not press down the mix. Cover with the steamer lid.
5. Heat water to boiling. Place the steamer on top of the pot and steam for 20 minutes over boiling water. Turn off heat.
6. Let it rest with the lid on for 5 minutes, then remove the steamer from the stove. Remove the lid and cool to room temperature.
Once the red one came out fine, I made 1/2 the recipe with the yellow beets. But as you can see in the picture below, what ends up on your plate after trying to make it look like a layered cake is just a sticky, sweet, bright rice cake bite. I'll take that.
I'll be doing a Korean cooking demo at the New York City Vegetarian Food Festival this Saturday (3:00 -3:45PM, 3/2) and Sunday (3:45 - 4:30PM, 3/3). If you're in NYC area, come by, say hi at the Pear Stage, and get a sample of my Korean food rather than just looking at the pictures here. ^^
KOREAN WORDS
겨울 (gyeo wul) winter
봄 (bom) spring
