Romantic Dinner - Beet Carpaccio Appetizer

Patrick O'Connell: Hi ! I am Patrick O'Connell and we are at the Inn at Little Washington, and we have all the ingredients assembled to make a roasted Beet Carpaccio. So, we have some whole beets here, we don't have to worry about peeling or doing anything with them. We are just going to get a nice Roasting Pan with a Lid, if you don't have one with a lid, a piece of Aluminum foil will work just as well.

Now, we are going to put our Beets in and we are pour some Balsamic vinegar over them, which will help concentrate their wonderful flavor and a little olive oil. You can vary the roasting ingredients anyway that you want. Then we have some rosemary, that we're just going to break up and throw in, and some wonderful Fresh Tyme. If you can get the fresh herbs, that makes a big difference. And put it into a 350 degree oven with the Lid on.

For, with beets this size, you are going to need almost an hour of cooking time. And to test, you can just pull the pan out and try to insert a pairing knife, and when it slides in all the way easily, your Beets will be done.

Then, the dressing that we're going to put over the dish will have orange juice, white wine vinegar, walnut oil, olive oil, some salt, fresh tarragon minced, a little shallot, and a little garlic. And we are actually then--, we'll whisk all those together and we'll end up with a wonderful citrus dressing, of course that can be made well in advance, even the night before. So, what we're going to do is bring the Beet out of the roasting pan and we can gently remove the peel, with a pairing knife, and it will just kind of, when it is warm, it will just kind of slip right off. But you do want to take that outer peel of the beet off. And you don't have to worry too much about the shape of the Beet, because we're going to a little magic trick with that.

So, now we're getting nice red fingers, so what we're going to do is, using a disc cutter, we're going to cut the beets in perfect rounds by inserting it right through the beet all the way in, and then we have a perfect little jewel like beet, that we can then run on the mandolin, which you'll need for this. This is a dangerous little tool, you can easily slice your hand, so you want to be very careful. So, we'll just run the Beet down the mandolin, and get our perfect little slices. You have beets are inexpensive, so you have plenty to work with, then we get our beautiful little slices.

With the slices, you'll be able to lay them in a patten, in a kind of rose like pattern on little parchment or delicate dressing papers and completely pre-assemble this, so the whole thing can be actually readied hours in advance and by laying the beet out like this, all you need to do when you're ready to serve it, is flip it over on to the plate.

So we're going to spoon a little of the citrus vinaigrette over top of our Beets, and that'll absorb in. What you will end up with, is a finished plate that looks like this, and the final garnishes are crme frache and Osetra caviar, which of course are completely optional, and we made here as an extra little garnish, jellied Vodka ice pick, pure vodka held together with a little gelatin, and then we've shown another kind of Beet as well, a little Baby Roasted Beet. So with the crme frache or the sower crme, we've thickened it a little bit by letting it rest in Cheesecloth for an hour or so. So the extra weight are forced through and we're left with a rather firm crme frache. So we're able to make it into a, what the French called a Little Canal with egg shape, and then on top of it, we've also made a little egg shape of our wonderful Osetra caviar. So we can just slide that on, just before serving.

We are going to put some chives on, some freshly snipped chives, and then we have these little cubes of Vodka ice pick, and of course, it's simply a bottle of Vodka with gelatin added. But when you eat it, you're having a little cocktail and it goes beautifully with all the flavors. People find it very intriguing on the tongue. And here's the finished dish ready to go to the table and I challenge people who hate Beets to try it and they will discover they suddenly have fallen in love with Beets. So, this is the Beet Carpaccio, and if they say they hate Beets, you can just dim the lights a little further and tell them this is roast beef, very rare or raw.