To The Beet of Its Own Vinegar

Blood-red beets aren’t always the most popular taproot, though Dwight Schrute certainly elevated their status with frequent mentions on The Office. This earthy sweet root vegetable is best roasted (then cooled) for green salads with goat cheese, or glazed with balsamic vinegar — as an acid is certainly needed to balance out their full dose of sucrose (sugar) and geosmin, the naturally occurring compound that tastes like dirt, but I was surprised to see beet vinegar while perusing the shelves at SOS Chefs — apple cider vinegar infused with fresh beets, producing a glowing garnet color that looks like a fiery sunset.

I think of beets mainly as the inverse: pickled, a memento of summer comforts and autumnal suffering for the long, cold winter months ahead. Vivian Howard, cookbook author and TV host of A Chef’s Life, boils her beets skin on before peeling and quartering them for pickles, with nearly equal parts beets to ACV to sugar, accented by garlic, chile, herbs and spices. At the same time, wellness guru Sara Park touts a 5-ingredient version with ginger and onion that’s good for the gut.

But not all beets have to be preserved. Even a splash of vinegar helps balance out the beet; see Top Chef Geoffrey Zakarian’s recipe. It’s from this stage that betteraves au vinaigre (French for pickled beets) really begin. They’re cold-brined as opposed to a piquantly potent pickle, which one can more subtly marinate and meld flavors, as seen interloping in many salads at The Ordinary, Chef Mike Lata’s restaurant in Charleston, SC, where pickled beets are a birthright. But why not gild the lily and dress a salad with roasted beetroot vinaigrette, as Safiye Ozkan, co-founder of Amsterdam-based design studio Atelier Barb, presents.

This almost begs the question: when does pickling liquid become vinegar itself? I guess there’s no question when it begins with beet-stained hands, straight from the farm, à la @monseigneurbienvenu — a beet vinegar that would make a Schrute proud.