Harissa Beet

These beets are cooked in our double boiler pressure cooker. We continue to use versions of this style of pressure cooker over the years, using mason jars as chambers as well as putting metal bowls and bain maries into the pressure cooker surrounded by an inch or two of water. This allows us to cook ingredients under pressure without diluting their flavors with excess liquids. It also allows us to cook grits, grains, and other ingredients without them sticking to the bottom of the pan. In this case, we cooked medium-sized beets with smoked kombu for 9 minutes. When the beets were cool, we peeled them, leaving as much of their root end intact. We then glazed them in a blend of harissa and brown butter. When the beets were warmed, we added a hefty drizzle of Steve’s Blis Elixir and a large spoonful of minced parsley stems. We let the sauce break to form a broken brown butter-harissa vinaigrette for the beets and then accented the beets and their roots with sliced parsley leaves. This was one of the tastiest beets we have cooked and I look forward to consuming more of them in the near future. We may be serving a version of this at one of our upcoming dinners. As a side note, we may have to explore making beet harissa for future preparations.