Finally, in the center, a massive golden beet completes the group portrait. Rotund and dense, this monster was a real challenge to cut up, although wrestling with the orange variety at least spares the indignity of staining your hands a gory color. Like the radish, this undersung vegetable also hide some artistic surprises beneath their thick skin. Tubers as a whole seem designed to hide their best qualities deep inside, and the slow approach of roasting is often the best for drawing out their flavors without much active work or additional ingredient assistance. Paired with some hearty bread, they make for a meal in themselves.
As the days grow warmer and root vegetable season recedes into recent memory, I’d like to pay a small tribute to one of my favorite traditions of this time of year: the traditional root veg roast up. Here a diverse variety of husky earth dwellers congregate for the tuber equivalent of a spa treatment - scrubbed clean of dirt, trimmed of eyes, bruises and hairy wisps of budding stolons - before being chopped and subjected to a program of blistering heat. The resultant fragments come out transformed: carrots, which I loathe under most circumstances, emerge from the oven newly sweet, soft and wrinkly, their intensified color complementing the purple hue of beets, the white flesh of potatoes and fiery orange yams. I’ve been conducting large scale winter root roasts for a few years now, but few sessions have typified the simple pleasures of rhizome roasting better than the all-star class of 2015-2016, featuring a few unlikely suspects who, like many of their veggie brethren, invariably benefit from some serious time in the stove. On top: Watermelon Radishes, who not only exhibit breathtaking starburst patterns upon slicing, but take to roasting with surprising alacrity, as I learned here. Also known as the Rooseheart or Red Meat, the Watermelon Radish is an heirloom Chinese Daikon that seems to appear more readily (and at lower cost) at NYC Farmer’s Markets than in grocery stores. Also part of the extended heirloom family are the carrots at bottom, which appeared in a variety of colors, from deep purple to motley blue-orange to a tranquil greenish yellow, hints of the many varieties available to curious produce hunters. This spectacular range of tints, shapes and sizes may at one point have been considered an affront to consistency, but now, in a more tolerant era, signal the funky, miscellaneous bounty of a season that can often seem drab on the surface.
Finally, in the center, a massive golden beet completes the group portrait. Rotund and dense, this monster was a real challenge to cut up, although wrestling with the orange variety at least spares the indignity of staining your hands a gory color. Like the radish, this undersung vegetable also hide some artistic surprises beneath their thick skin. Tubers as a whole seem designed to hide their best qualities deep inside, and the slow approach of roasting is often the best for drawing out their flavors without much active work or additional ingredient assistance. Paired with some hearty bread, they make for a meal in themselves.
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