Vegetables
Beetroot
The longest vegetable cook in the catalogue when left whole, and worth every minute.
What it does in fast-moving hot air
A beetroot is a dense storage root with a high sugar content and a skin that behaves as a seal. Cooked whole, it effectively steams in its own moisture inside that skin while the outside dries — which is why no oil is called for and why the time is so long. The sugars concentrate rather than caramelising, because the surface never gets dry enough to brown properly until very late. Cut it up first and the whole character changes: the cut faces caramelise fast and the flesh dries out, which is a different and less good result rather than a faster version of the same one.
Why the cut matters
Beetroot takes three times as long as a carrot and comes out sweeter than anything else in this section. The published figure is for whole beets with no oil, which is unusual and tells you what is going on inside.
Cooking pages
- Whole beetroot — Fresh whole beetroot gets thirty-five minutes to an hour at 200°C with no oil in one manufacturer's charts for two machines.
- Dried beetroot slices — Fresh beetroot in 3mm slices gets six to eight hours at 60°C in one manufacturer's chart.
This page gives no cooking answer of its own. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. Any figure mentioned above is one manufacturer’s, and the page for the cut says which machine, quantity and state it was printed for, or that the manufacturer named no state.