Vegetables

Beetroot

Thirty to forty minutes whole — the longest vegetable cook in the catalogue, and worth every one of them.

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 — Thirty to forty minutes with no oil at all — the longest vegetable cook here.
Dried beetroot slices — Six to eight hours at 60°C for 3mm slices.

There is deliberately no cooking time on this page. A food does not have one — a cut, at a thickness, in a state, at a loading, in a particular appliance does. That is what the pages above are for.