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Tony’s Braised Beets

Ingredients

• 4-6 tennis-ball sized beets - try to make sure they’re about the same size or you’ll get too much texture variety
• butter
• frozen concentrated juice of your choice
• salt and pepper
• balsamic vinegar
• goat cheese (at room temp)
• two pans made of decent enough material so they can hold heat well - not those flimsy/thin aluminum non-stick pans

Directions

• BALSAMIC REDUCTION
  1. This is a 2-pan dish. In the smaller pan, you want to get somewhere between a 1/2 cup and 1 cup of balsamic vinegar on the boil. Basically, use as much high quality balsamic vinegar as you can spare without it costing you an arm and a leg. Believe me, you’ll want more later. Bring it up to a boil and then let it sit reducing on a low simmer the whole time you’re doing everything else. Once it starts getting thick, stir it gently to make sure it’s not sticking on the bottom or forming a skin on top. If it starts getting too syrup-ey, just take it off the burner and set it aside. The final product should have the appearance and viscosity of Hershey’s chocolate syrup, and will be almost as sweet.
• BEETS
  1. Cut the tails and stems off your beets, and peel the skin. Cut them into 8 wedges and try to make the size as consistent as you can.
     • (note: my trick is to place them flat on the spot where I cut off the tail, then cut them into quarters from above with a chef’s knife. You can then cut each of those quarters in half to produce 1/8th wedges, or (if you got knife skillz and can keep the ball of the beet together without letting the slippery quarters slip around too much) just make 2 more cuts from above - voila!)
  2. In your other - bigger - frying pan, fill with about an inch of water, add a dash of salt, and bring to a full / rolling boil. Throw the beets in and blanche them for about 5-8 minutes. Watch this process closely because you want the beets to be just a hair under-done when you pull them out. Keep pulling out tester beets and tasting them - when they’re almost done, drain them to a colander and leave them there to rest for a minute.
  3. Put your now empty pan back on the hot burner, and add 2 tablespoons of butter, 1 tablespoon of frozen juice concentrate, and 1 tbsp of water . (note: I’ve used orange juice and lemonade before, but please feel free to experiment here. I’m guessing grapefruit juice might be nice for this - you want something tangy to balance the butter).
  4. Let everything melt and come up to a serious boiling bubble. Throw the beets back in and keep everything on medium high stirring the whole time. Season with salt and pepper. The beets will drink up the butter/juice mixture fairly quickly, so keep everything moving around and reducing. Once all the syrup is soaked up, give everything another minute or two on sear, and pull it off just before you get that burned-butter smell. Let cool for 5 minutes.
  5. Once they’re ready to eat, arrange on a serving plate, sprinkle with crumbles of room-temperature goat cheese, and drizzle liberally with cooled-off balsamic.