Beetroot Salad with Sour Cream Dressing

Name: Beetroot Salad with Sour Cream Dressing – Easy Recipe
Prep time: 1 h 30 min
Cook time: 15 min
Total time: 1 h 45 min
Cuisine: European
Ingredients: Red beetroot 1 kg; Salt to taste; Sugar 1–2 pinches; Thick sour cream ½ cup (100 g); Soy sauce 1–2 drops; Prepared table mustard ¼ tsp; Black pepper to taste

☆ 5

1 h 45 mins

We make beetroot salad a lot. When I was at school, at the start of every summer we were sent off to summer camps to get a taste of rest and work. Usually the work was simple — picking young vegetables. Carrots, cabbage, beetroot. Sometimes strawberries, but rarely. I remember one moment: we were being driven in a rickety old bus, and the foreman was explaining to our supervisor that we would be picking “beta”. Beta? What beta??? It turns out that Beta is the Latin name of a herbaceous plant of the amaranth family — the beetroot everyone knows.

Originally from Asia, this root vegetable is one of the oldest cultivated plants. Interestingly, at first only the tops were eaten, while the root (the fleshy part) was used as medicine. Beetroot reached our lands relatively recently — only some 10 centuries ago. You can still hear its old name, Sviatoslav’s vegetable. The chronicles first mention beetroot in the Izbornik of Sviatoslav, the miscellany compiled in Kyivan Rus’, hence the name.

Today beetroot is grown everywhere, and quite successfully. Some varieties can grow even in harsh climates. Along with the familiar “red” varieties, there are industrial ones grown for livestock feed or sugar production. I remember from childhood that my grandmother’s huge vegetable garden (I shudder just thinking of it) had, besides the beds of cucumbers and tomatoes, a big plot of beetroot. And scattered all over the garden, among the thickets of potatoes, grew enormous sugar beets. By autumn we’d end up with two tonnes of them, or more. The cows and pigs were happy all winter. One catch: we had to buy varietal seeds every year, because beetroot cross-pollinates readily, and the result was a hybrid that was not deep red-black but pale pink and striped.

As for red beetroot, we cooked it in all sorts of ways. First and foremost — herring under a fur coat salad. It’s the pinnacle of our home cooking. Layered salads like herring under a fur coat or Mimosa salad are a bit of a mystery to foreigners, which is a pity.

One of our favourite home recipes is the salad beetroot with prunes. We add walnuts to it and sometimes a little grated cheese — just a little. But I’m not keen on this recipe because of the dressing. I’m no fan of mayonnaise, especially shop-bought. Although, if there’s no way around it, you can make homemade mayonnaise. But experience shows you can always come up with a suitable sauce that isn’t fat-based.

Here is a simple recipe — homemade beetroot salad. Not just simple, but really simple. A tasty salad with sour cream sauce.

Ingredients

4 servings

Red beetroot 1 kg
Salt to taste
Sugar 1–2 pinches

Thick sour cream ½ cup (100 g)
Soy sauce 1–2 drops
Prepared table mustard ¼ tsp
Black pepper to taste

Step-by-step recipe

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Baking the beetroot

Don’t be put off by the long cooking time. Most of it is needed for the baked beetroot to cool down. I’m not a fan of boiled vegetables in salads: they soak up water and lose flavour. I prefer baked vegetables. For vinaigrette salad and Olivier salad we always bake the vegetables. The only salad vegetable we boil is carrot for herring under a fur coat — baked carrot is just hard to grate on a coarse grater.

Be sure to wash the beetroot and trim off the tail and what’s left of the tops.

Pierce each root right through with a thin knife so steam can escape while cooking.
Place the roots on a heatproof dish and bake. Baking beetroot is easy: you can do it in an oven or a stove. We successfully bake salad vegetables in an ordinary microwave on full power. For example, 1 kg of beetroot bakes to the right state in about 24–27 minutes. In another microwave the time may differ, but not by much.
Whatever method you use, the beetroot should be fully cooked and starting to wrinkle slightly. Wrinkling means the roots are done and have begun to lose moisture. At this stage the flesh turns slightly sweet — or rather, noticeably sweet.
Let the roots cool completely. Peel the wrinkled skin off the beetroot. It’s easy. If some spots are stubborn, trim them a little with a knife.

The sauce

Grate the peeled roots on a coarse grater.
Salt to taste and add 1–2 pinches of sugar. Mix. Leave for a few minutes for the sugar and salt to dissolve.

Make the sauce: mix half a cup of thick low-fat sour cream (100 g) — by no means sour-tasting — with 1–2 drops of good soy sauce and a quarter teaspoon of prepared table mustard.
I understand, of course, that for many people mayonnaise is sauce number one. But I recommend trying my sauce. To test it, you can make just a little, to get a feel for the taste and adjust it to your own liking.
Season with freshly ground black pepper. Stir thoroughly.

Dressing and serving

Make sure the sugar and salt in the salad have dissolved, then add the sauce. The amount of sauce is strictly to taste. If any sauce is left over, spread it on bread — it makes a great sandwich.
Stir the beetroot salad. It may need a little more salt. It’s hard to advise here — taste it first.
Put the beetroot salad into salad bowls and serve. You can also chill the salad in the fridge for 1–2 hours — it gets even tastier.
By the way, beetroot salad goes perfectly as a side with fried chicken thighs cooked on the grill, or with new potatoes with dill.

Calories and macros

155 kcal

Serving ≈ 280 g

Protein5 g14% of kcal
Fat5 g33% of kcal
Carbs18 g53% of kcal

100 g57 kcalProtein 1.7 gFat 1.8 gCarbs 6.6 g

Calculated from the recipe ingredients, excluding salt and spices. Data: USDA and Matvaretabellen.

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To Get It Right

Sour cream with no tang

The sour cream for beetroot salad should be thick and neutral in taste, with no sour tang — homemade is best. If low-fat sour cream tastes sour, take a fattier one: for this sauce taste matters more than fat content.

How much sauce

For 1 kg of beetroot, half a cup of sour cream (100 g) is enough for the salad — a moderate dressing. If you like it juicier, make one and a half times more sauce, but don’t overdo it: the beetroot is juicy anyway, and the salad will turn runny.

Changing the sauce

The sour cream sauce for beetroot can be varied widely. Readers add 1–2 drops of lemon or lime juice. Try it on a spoonful of sauce first, then dress the whole salad.

With carrot, walnuts, prunes

In beetroot salad, you can swap part of the beetroot for carrot — it’s great with this dressing too.
With walnuts and prunes — the salad beetroot with prunes.
With baked beetroot, apple and walnuts — baked beetroot salad with apple.

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Questions and answers

How do I bake beetroot for salad in the oven?

Wash it, trim the tail, pierce it with a knife, wrap in foil and bake at 180–200 °C for about 1–1.5 hours. It’s done when a knife goes in easily and the skin starts to wrinkle.

Can I make this salad with boiled beetroot?

Yes, the sauce works with boiled beetroot too. But baked tastes better: boiled beetroot soaks up water and loses flavour. Boil it whole, in its skin, for about an hour after the water comes to the boil, until a knife goes in easily.

Can I make the salad with raw beetroot?

This recipe is for baked beetroot: it’s soft and noticeably sweet. Raw beetroot is firmer and less sweet, so with the sour cream sauce the taste will be different.

Can I make beetroot salad with garlic?

Yes: a little garlic in the sour cream sauce won’t hurt. And with garlic and mayonnaise there’s a separate recipe, beet salad with garlic.

Can I make beetroot salad for winter?

Not this one: with sour cream the salad is made for one go and kept in the fridge for no more than a day. If you want beetroot to keep, try pickled beets — a jar keeps well in the fridge.

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