Roasting & Preparing Beets

Todd Gray: I am Todd Gray and I am preparing Seared Diver Scallops with Roasted Beets and Garden Herb Salad. We are going to get started by roasting our beets.

Lets place our beets in our baking dish, being sure that they are not stacked on top of each other. We'll drizzle with extra-virgin olive oil, a couple of cranks of fresh cracked black pepper and finally some good coarse sea salt.

We now place this in a preheated 325 degree oven for about an hour. After about an hour we remove our beets from the oven, being sure that they are cooked, we do a skewer test. We take our skewer into our largest beet, stand it in the center. We remove the skewer. Now we begin to peel. With our hands with our gloves on, we peel the beet, peeling away the roasted skin to reveal that nice beautiful roasted beet flesh. So now should I am going to do just a couple of them that you would normally want to do in the entire amount of beets that you have roasted. We have our nice red beet here, candy cane beets, golden beets beautiful range of colors. This is going to make our dish wonderful presentation.

You see I have got my gloves on; I am using them to prevent getting the beet stains on our hands. It can be very difficult to get off. The rubber gloves make it easy to peel and easy to remove when we are done.

Now that our beets have been peeled, we need to put them on our mandolin. A mandolin is a type of a slicing instrument that we use in a kitchen. We are looking for good solid mandolin that has a solid base for a stand that has a good sharp blade and a good rotary adjustment for adjusting the thickness. Today I am using a Good Grips mandolin but any good mandolin will work fine.

If you do not have a mandolin, you can use a good chef knife. Chef knife that has good balance and a good edge. I am using a Wsthof today but any solid high quality knife will work well. Lets put our beets onto the mandolin and slice them. We take them being very careful that we dont get our hand below the beet and slicing in an even motion, back and forth, back and forth. I am using my red beet first and then I will switch up to using one of my smaller orange almost pink beet, the candy cane beets. Again, being very careful, that gets down. We go on to our next beet. Then Ill use one of my smaller ones here. Here we go.

Now that we have completed the slicing of the beets we can go on to the next step of preparing our Vinaigrette.