Spiced-Wine-Poached Beets and Cinnamon Brown Sugar Panna Cotta

This coming Monday concludes the first round of Beet n squash YOU! - a fun food fight hosted by Mel of Gourmet Fury and me. We've had so much fun hosting the event and going through all the fabulous entries. I never knew beets could be turned into so many delicious dishes. My blogger friends and readers are such talented people.

As one of the self-appointed judges, my beet concoction was rendered ineligible even before it was made. Yet, I went ahead and made it anyway. Wanting so much to impress you all with my deft beet cooking skills, I decided I'd go all fancy with a multi-element dessert. It's not that I don't know that when it comes to cooking, simpler is often better and oftentimes the more you put into the dish, the less it gives back in terms of satisfaction. Oh, I know that. Time and time again, especially when it comes to entertaining at home, that has proven true.

But arrogance clouded my judgment and I, with my chin haughtily raised, informed the fresh beets on my kitchen counter that they would become spiced-wine-poached beets to be served with my favorite brown sugar-cinnamon panna cotta. And should any cautious and sensible soul so much as make a peep about the questionable edibility of the dish, I would give him/her a side-way glance à la Nigella Lawson and vampishly sibilate, "Mais bien sûr, vous n'avez jamais entendu parler des betteraves au vin épicé, façon poires pochées?" Assigning a French name to any dish, as I have learned, exponentially increases its perceived value. Try calling your French toast, "pain perdu" or your green bean casserole, "haricots verts gratinés à la Mornay," and watch people gape in awe of your culinary genius.

Signs of doom manifested themselves right from the get-go. The plan was to tourné the beets as cubing was deemed too bourgeois. With a peeled beet in my left hand, dripping with deep red/purple juice, and a paring knife in my right hand, I stood completely still in my kitchen for several minutes before admitting in agony that I was kidding myself; I didn't, and still don't, know how to tourné anything -- beets or non-beets. To minimize the impact on my already-bruised ego, I proceeded to cut the beet into 1/2-inch slices and, with a tiny cookie cutter, cut out flower-shaped pieces of beet.

Flower-shaped beets. I'm an idiot.


The beets then went into a pot and some good Shiraz was poured over them. Some brown sugar went in, along with cinnamon sticks, whole cloves, whole star anise, large pieces of orange rinds, and freshly-squeezed juice of an orange. The beets were simmered in the spiced wine over medium heat for almost an hour.

In the meantime, I made my panna cotta. With the earthy flavor of the beets and the autumnal/holiday-ish fragrance of the spices in mind, I substituted brown sugar for regular granulated sugar in my go-to panna cotta recipe. Some ground cinnamon was added to the cream just to tie in the flavor with the poached beets. In less than ten minutes, the panna cotta was done, poured into dome-shaped molds, and refrigerated to set. [See the comment section for the recipe, if you're interested.]

When the poached beets got soft enough to pierce through with a paring knife, yet still held their shapes, they were fished out and set aside while the poaching liquid got further reduced over low heat until it turned syrupy. The pot got removed from the stove and set aside to cool. After the panna cotta had set, I unmolded one onto a serving plate, arranged the poached beets all around the wobbly gelled cream, and drizzled the reduced poaching liquid over the whole thing. The plated dessert looked very nice.But did it taste good? As you must have guessed, the answer is no. This post was tagged "She Bombs" for a reason. While the brown sugar-cinnamon panna cotta was delicious, the spiced-wine-poached beets were far from stupendous. Edible? Yeah. Good? I can think of worse foods. Would I make it again? Uh, no. I'll stick with pears. Thank you very much.

Lesson learned: creativity must be accompanied by careful consideration of what's involved. Using beets in lieu of pears in this particular situation is an attempt to solve a nonexistent problem. The reason poached pears have remained one of the most popular fruit desserts for such a long time is because pears taste great wine-poached. While the taste of wine-poached beets was fine, the texture kind of turned me off. Beets were not allowed to be themselves and really show me what they had to offer; they were forced to perform as an impostor and a not so good one at that.

My mea culpa to beets and their loved ones for this ill-advised transgression. I'll now resign myself to solitary confinement where I'll remain in shame until further notice.

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