("Dio e Zingaro" by Municipale Balcanica)
- Hi, I'm Jerry James Stone,
and you're watching Cooking Stoned.
On today's episode we're gonna make red wine pickled beets.
These are gonna be amazing,
but before I get into those I want to mention a few things.
First off, you might notice that I'm now miked.
I did a little bit of an equipment upgrade,
and I finally have a somewhat professional microphone,
which I'm still learning,
so pardon me through my growing pains here.
Groan pains, not growing pains, but groan pains.
I'm still kinda figuring it all out.
It's also a little awkward being wired
while videoing and cooking. (laughs)
That's a new thing for me, too.
Yeah, I have a few things kinda going on here,
so I just wanna note that.
You guys, some of you have asked me about
sound quality and that sort of thing,
and equipment is really expensive, so I'm working on it.
The second thing is I'm working on a cookbook.
If you haven't seen yet, I'm doing this
holiday cookbook called Holidazed.
It's a cocktail cookbook.
Some great news around that is that
one, most of the recipes are done.
Two, we're funded 'cause I Kickstarted the cookbook.
Thirdly, which I'm really excited about,
a friend of mine, who's singer Michelle Branch,
she actually will be contributing to the cookbook too.
You can pick up that cookbook,
you can visit my website, there's a link for it there.
Or, go to Kickstarter, whatever,
but it's called Holidazed.
Check it out if you can and pick up a copy.
Now let's get to making some pickled beets, okay?
The first thing we're gonna do here
is take our three pounds of beets,
and we're gonna roast them covered
with a little bit of olive oil
and just a little bit of salt.
Just a splash, not a whole lot there.
Roast it at 400 degrees,
for about an hour until they're fork-tender.
While our beets are broiling,
we're gonna go ahead and start making the brine.
We already have 1/3 cup of brown sugar.
A 1/3 cup of honey and one tablespoon of salt in the pan.
We're gonna add in our water,
which is a 1/2 cup of water.
Add two cups of red wine vinegar.
Then we're gonna add some actual red wine.
We're gonna add a full cup of that.
Then we're gonna bring this to a boil
and let it all combine.
Now we're gonna go ahead and
sort of get our jars ready for the beets and the brine.
We're just gonna keep them in this scalding hot water
that's sort of simmering,
until we're ready to use them actually.
You don't need any fancy ingredients
or fancy tools for this.
There's also sort of DIY ways you can do this,
but the jars will sort of sit here
until we're ready to prepare them for their final canning.
The beets are roasted and peeled
and ready to be pickled, but before we do that,
we have to prepare the remaining jars.
I'm gonna add a 1/2 teaspoon
of black peppercorns to every jar.
Then we're gonna add one sprig
of rosemary to each jar.
And two sprigs of thyme.
This is gonna be really flavorful.
These are kinda large, on the large side of,
as far as sprigs are concerned.
I'm just gonna split those up
and then get our thyme for each one.
Hopefully I can aim better than that.
Just add those to each jar.
Thyme's one of my favorites.
Don't get me wrong, I love rosemary.
It gets a lot of play, it's sort of chic to use,
but thyme just is one of my favorite little herbs.
I like to sneak it in to many different things.
Add those in.
Then we'll add in our beets and our brine.
We're gonna add in the quartered and peeled beets,
dividing the three pounds,
which actually, probably at this point
with the roasting and the peeling
has probably been reduced to about 2 1/2 pounds,
but dividing it amongst the four jars.
Now we're gonna go ahead and add our brining liquid,
so it's just about a 1/2 inch from the rim.
Gonna put them in this hot bath,
making sure they're covered one inch all around.
After they've sat in their bath for 10 minutes,
they're ready to go.
Enjoy.
("Dio e Zingaro" by Municipale Balcanica)