Growing Food: Aunt Belva's Pickled Beets

Okay! I failed last week to give you this recipe, but now Aunt Belva's recipe for pickled beets is going global.

Or as global as this blog gets, I guess.

Aunt Belva was not my aunt. She was actually the aunt of A.'s uncle by marriage. He (the uncle) is from southern Indiana, and so, presumably, was Aunt Belva. I got this recipe from A.'s aunt. The one that's married to the uncle. Who was Aunt Belva's nephew.

Got all that? Yeah, never mind.

In any case, this is an excellent recipe for pickled beets. One of the different things about it is that it uses equal amounts sugar and vinegar. I had never tried making any other kind of brine for pickled beets, so a couple of years ago I tried a recipe from a newer canning cookbook I have* that promised a much less sweet pickled beet, using about half the amount of sugar.

They certainly were less sweet. They were also almost inedibly vinegary. I managed to finish them by using them in very small amounts in salads, but it was not enjoyable. Lesson learned: Equal amounts of vinegar and sugar make for much better pickled beets.

I didn't have enough beets from the garden to pickle this year, because they, like everything else, succumbed to the hail and grassphoppers. 

Chickens in the garden, but not in the beets.

However, my sister brought me three big beets from the store when she visited a few months ago. I decided the best use for them would be to pickle them, so I went back to Aunt Belva's recipe. And I found I love them just as much now as I did when I first tried them. They have plenty of vinegar in them, too, but it's balanced by quite a lot of sugar. They taste just as pickled beets should.

I have to note here, as this is a canning recipe, that this is not the vinegar ratio approved by the USDA for water bath canning. All the recipes for water bath canning pickled beets use twice as much vinegar as sugar, which is similar to the newer recipe I tried and didn't like. 

This recipe does, however, have the same amount of vinegar per pounds of beets to be canned as the approved recipes, it's just that it also increases the sugar a lot. I don't have any problem canning it in a water bath. Neither did A.'s aunt, who always canned hers in a water bath. If that makes you nervous, though, you can just skip the canning and store them in the refrigerator, or pressure can them.

Aunt Belva's Pickled Beets

Ingredients for Brine

2 cups water

2 cups sugar

2 cups cider vinegar

1 teaspoon ground allspice (I don't have this, and have never used it)

1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

1 teaspoon ground cloves

Method

1) The recipe I got didn't specify an amount of beets, but A.'s aunt told me it's for about three pounds. I typically roast them whole, then peel them and cut them into a dice. I like them diced because I use them in salads, but you can also leave them whole or slice them.

2) Heat all brine ingredients together until hot, either in a pot on the stove or in the microwave.

3) Put the prepared beets in clean, sterilized, and hot pint jars, cover with the hot brine, put on the lids and rings, and process in a boiling water bath for 30 minutes at low altitude. Or, in my case, for 40 minutes, because I am not at low altitude.

* It's called Canning for a New Generation. I've tried a couple of recipes from it, and honestly, I was not all that impressed with them. It's a fun book to read, but I can't really recommend the recipes. It's a little too modern for me, I guess.