Beetroot is a vegetable already familiar to our distant ancestors, and even nowadays it is an ingredient for preparing many dishes: borscht, salads, beetroot and even marmalade. But, despite the obvious benefits, they often refuse to prepare salads, because the vegetable requires a long heat treatment. If you know a few tricks, then you can cook beets in just a few minutes.
You can cook beets in different ways: traditionally, that is, in a saucepan of water, in a slow cooker, in an oven and even in a microwave. Let's consider each method in more detail.
It will take at least 2 hours to cook beets in the usual way, so it is better to cook them first. How to cook beets in a saucepan?
It is necessary to wash the beets well and fill them with cold water, while the liquid should completely hide the tubers, salt is not required to add, because its presence will slow down the cooking process and make the beets harder. To keep the vegetable bright red, you can add lemon juice to the pan at the rate of a teaspoon per 2 liters of water. The readiness of the beets is checked with a fork or a sharp knife, if the vegetable is easily pierced, then you can remove it from the water and cool it.
It will take no more than an hour to cook beets in this way. To do this, you must first heat the water and place the beets in boiling water, to increase the temperature of the liquid, you must add a couple of tablespoons of sunflower oil to the pan. When the beets boil and boil over high heat for about half an hour, remove the pan and put it under a stream of ice water for another 20 minutes. Such a temperature difference quickly brings the vegetable to readiness and at the same time cools it down.
Cooking beets in this way will take no more than 40 minutes. To steam a vegetable, you need to thoroughly rinse the beets, put them on the steam grate, pour 1 - 2 glasses of water into the multicooker bowl, then set the steaming mode, close the multicooker lid and go about your business.
In this case, it will take from an hour to an hour and a half, the method is slightly different from the usual, traditional, when the beets are boiled in a saucepan, only you do not need to monitor the power of the fire in the burner.
This method takes no more than half an hour. Beets must be washed and wrapped in foil without peeling. Preheat the oven to 180 - 200 degrees and place a baking sheet with vegetables in it. This method is ideal for those cases where a lot of beets are required, for example, for a festive table.
Perhaps the fastest of all the methods presented, in which the beets are cooked in 20 minutes. The vegetable must be washed, put in a heat-resistant dish, on the bottom of which you need to pour a few tablespoons of water and cover with a lid. When placing vegetables in dishes, it is necessary to place the larger ones at the edges, and smaller ones towards the center. If the microwave oven produces a power of 1000 or more watts, then the beets will be cooked in no more than 10 minutes; with low-power units, it will take a little more time. The ovenware can be replaced with a baking bag.
In order for the beets to retain their bright color and not color the rest of the vegetables, you need to cut them into a separate bowl, sprinkle with sunflower oil, mix, and only then spread them with the rest of the ingredients.
