- Hi, my name is Amy Freidig
and I'm a Program Assistant
with the Wisconsin Master Gardener Program, state office,
which is part of UW-Extension
and today I'm here to talk to you about beets.
So the thing about beets is
you either love them or you hate them.
So I want to take a little survey before we,
before I launch in here.
I want you to raise your hand if you are a beet lover.
Oh boy (laughing).
All right, so ...
(audience member shouting)
Hold on.
Is there anybody brave enough here to admit
that they are a beet hater.
Oh we got a few, a few.
Now is there anybody in the middle?
Ambivalence, not quite sure?
All right, well.
Today I hope to convince those in the middle
and in the broken, black heart over there,
over to the love side of things.
So a little background about me and how I feel about beets.
I grew up, not being a beet lover.
I didn't, you know, I knew they were a vegetable.
And I grew up with a mom and a grandpa who gardened,
so I was around that.
But you know, my mom gardened in the style
that I lovingly call benign neglect.
As you can kind of see here
but with an example picture of my garden
which is largely untended
and left to survival of the fittest.
But I never grew up growing beets.
And I didn't really become exposed to them
until I went to college.
I did my undergraduate work
at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
And it was there that I took a class
called World Vegetable Crops
and it was there that I was first exposed
to all these fascinating aspects
of this vegetable, the beet,
and I was hooked.
So then I went to graduate school
for plant breeding and plant genetics
at the University of Wisconsin
and there I was lucky enough to work with
Dr. Irwin Goldman
in his carrot, onion, and beet breeding lab.
And in that lab, he and his students work to improve
these vegetable crops that are grown throughout our state.
And you're looking at a picture of me here
working hard in the lab
working on a beet sample for my study.
So, it was there that I got to work,
you know, every day with this vegetable
and really get to experience it
and also to talk to a lot of people about the beet.
So that's the neat thing about this vegetable
is a lot of people have a story to tell about them.
How they love them. How they hate them.
How they grow them. How they can't get them to grow.
How they eat them.
I've even had someone tell me about their grandma's Harvard Beet recipe.
So, that's the really neat thing about this vegetable
is there's always a story.
So today, I'm going to tell you the story of beets.
And I know the title said
"Everything you ever wanted to learn or know about beets."
And we're not going to get to quite everything.
We're going to talk about the topics
that I find fascinating.
I'm going to tell you a little bit about the domestication,
some related plant family members,
we're going to talk about its color and its flavor.
And for me honestly this is a love story, okay.
I really love talking about this vegetable
and today I want you to leave
feeling this new sense of wonder over this vegetable
and I know I'm talking to a room full of beet lovers
but I just hope your heart grows
even a little bigger towards this vegetable.
So let's start at the beginning
and let's talk about the domestication of beets.
So what is domestication? I went online.
I went to a dictionary website to get a general definition.
And this-- When you Google it you get a bunch of them.
And this is the definition that's most applicable to us
and I'll read it.
Domestication means to adapt a plant
so as to be cultivated by and beneficial to human beings.
So beets are a domesticated crop that we have for many years
grown and improved upon.
So it follows that the beets we grow in our gardens today
didn't start out that way.
So wild beets originate from the Southeast shores
of the Mediterranean, the Near East and Northern Africa.
The area-- That's a world map there.
It might be kind of light for you to see
but it's the area inside the red circle.
So consequently,
because this is where they originated
they have a pretty good salt tolerance.
And those beets that originated there
didn't look like the you know the swollen red tennis balls
that we're used to growing in our gardens.
They were a leaf beet.
So think more like a Swiss Chard
or, you know, leaves.
And those type of leaf beets were actually cultivated
by ancient Romans in their gardens.
And it actually goes as far back as the ancient Greeks.
Aristotle made mention of these
in ancient texts and others as well.
And these leaf beets were actually being cultivated
in other parts of the world even before that.
So domestication was going on there,
likely with the Romans cultivating these beets
which they used as a vegetable crop
as well as medicinally.
But we need to discuss how it got from that leafy crop
towards the more swollen rooted shaped vegetable,
more like the modern beet that we're used to today.
You know, and it didn't just magically happen.
You know, there wasn't reference
to these swollen rooted types until the 16th century.
But somewhere back in history,
there's likely ancient plant breeding going on
where these beets were selected
for characteristics that were desirable,
which eventually resulted in selection for the
swollen rooted vegetables.
And some have also suggest--
That's a beet in the snow by the way.
Some have suggested an interesting possibility
for another way that his domestication
might have happened.
So this possibility is this.
As humans moved into Northern Europe,
they experienced a shorter growing season
and a colder, longer, harsher winter.
So, we're coming out of winter here.
I'm sure it doesn't take much for you to put yourself
in that position.
What are you going to need when you have a longer winter?
You're going to need a food source that stores
that you can eat, you can access throughout that cold time.
So, it's possible that as the beet traveled north
with these people,
people were selecting for this root crop that had--
It was a good solid sugary food source
that could store really well
throughout the summer.
And so they keep selecting and propagating these beets
that are big and it's gonna keep selecting for those type
of characteristics that are gonna get it closer and closer
to the beets that we're used to today.
So I think that's really interesting to think about
how this geographical situation
may have influenced
what plant characteristics people selected for.
And there's also something that I find really elegant
about this possibility
and it has to do with how beets have a biennial life cycle.
So, if you're not familiar with what a biennial is,
I'm gonna explain it real quick.
A biennial takes two seasons to go from seed to seed.
And so with a beet,
the first season, there you go,
you're going to plant your beet seed.
It's going to germinate. It's going to grow.
It's going to produce leaves.
and then that first season, it'll produce the root.
Now normally, vegetable gardeners are gonna stop there.
They're going to harvest the root.
But depending on where you are,
say in a climate not quite like Wisconsin,
a little bit milder, the beet can overwinter outside
and beets need to have an exposure to a certain
a cold treatment, a certain period of cold.
They need to experience in order to
flower the following season.
So it can overwinter in warmer climates
and then it can kind of come back to life, if you will,
the following season,
and uses that-- It's got that sugary root.
That's what it's using as energy to power flowering.
It'll shoot up a flower stock the following season.
And then flowers, pollen, and produce seed.
So two seasons to go from seed to seed,
that's what's a biennial.
So rewind back in time
and think to those earlier humans again
that were selecting for those roots
that had that stored sugar that they could
store and use all winter long.
And it was also those characteristics
that were beneficial to the table beet for reproduction
because that swollen sugary root
could also help it, you know,
have a lot of energy to flower well
and reproduce to the next generation.
So, I just kind of find that really elegant.
It's like getting two birds with one stone.
The humans were selecting for things,
for characteristics that worked out for them
and it also aided the plant and reproduction.
So I really like that domestication story
and another thing that I really love about beets
is that they're not the only child of the beet world.
And that's not a slam on only children.
I can say that, I am one, so.
Beets have what I like to think of
as close brothers and sisters in the plant world.
And I want to introduce you to a few of them.
And you may already know them
and you may already be growing them.
Well, let's start out with the Table beet.
This is star of the show today.
And its scientific name is beta vulgaris,
subspecies vulgaris, garden beet group.
And here we have one of its closely related
plant family members, Swiss chard.
Beta vulgaris, subspecies vulgaris, leaf boot group,
is its scientific name.
And you'll notice that it's a pretty similar scientific name
to the Table beet.
And that kind of shows you how closely related these are.
These different cultivated beet types.
But they're selected for different characteristics.
The beet's selected for-- That's a root vegetable.
This Swiss chard,
we've selected for a large palatable leaf
that we can consume as a vegetable.
And as a vegetable, it's eaten.
You can chop it up, saut? it.
But it's also found in salad mixes.
And it's really beautiful.
This is a Swiss chard leaf
and they come in a variety of different colors.
This pink or red,
yellow, orange,
those can come in blends as well,
where the different kinds
are blended together in the packet.
And you'll also, this is one of my favorites.
It also comes with a non-pigmented petiole.
This is on the right of that raised bed.
That's a Fordhook Giant, that's the cultivar.
And it produces these like big beautiful glossy green leaves.
And they're growing next to pea plants,
so you can see how tall they can get.
And...
What I really like about these is that,
yes, they're edible, but they also have ornamental value
and you can use them in container gardening
as well as borders.
And if you're familiar with the
thriller, filler, spiller concept of container gardening,
they make a great filler,
and I think they also
can make a really eye-popping thriller.
Oops.
Next up,
a little bit more utilitarian,
slightly less beautiful beet
or member of the beet family,
Mangel or Fodder beet.
So this Mangel is growing in the ground here
very similarly to a beet.
It looks fairly close to it.
It's got the same type of shape.
It's not going to be that really pretty round
tennis-ball shape.
But a Mangel is a swarthy big root,
full of sugar, stores really well,
and it's, because of that it's ideal for animal feed.
And there's another picture of it.
You can-- You can kind of--
Don't get a really good sense of scale there
but I've grown this and I've pulled them out.
Especially on edges, they can get to be really big.
That's about six or eight inches across,
something really hard you got to yank out of the ground.
You can eat this. You can buy this seed.
You can grow it in your garden.
There's a yellow, and I believe a red variety
that you can buy online.
And you may not want to wait till they get this big
if you're going to try to eat them.
You might want to harvest them as like a little baby Mangel
and give it a try.
And next up,
the next brother or sister we have,
is the sugar beet.
And, also not really a looker.
(audience laughing)
This beet is an important source of sucrose or sugar.
Hence the name.
It can also reach large sizes
and it's white fleshed on the inside.
I think the foliage is really pretty though.
It's this really, a pretty light green I like.
Here's pictures, some big piles of it.
It's a very important crop here in the United States.
It's responsible for 55% of sugar production
in the United States.
And it's grown in acreage throughout,
but significant acreage is east of the Mississippi,
the Far West and the Great Plains.
And like with the Mangel,
you can also try growing this in your own garden for fun.
You can get seed
and I've grown it and eaten it fresh out of the field.
Yes, it's sugary and sweet,
also kind of tastes like soap.
But like with the Mangel, you might have a different,
more pleasant culinary experience
if you harvest them when they're little.
So, those are the extended cultivated brothers and sisters
of the beet.
But I also want to talk a little bit
about the beets extended family.
So the Table beet and its closely related relatives
are part of a plant family
that was called the Chenopodiaceae.
And in the late 90s it started,
kind of changed and got into the plant family
called the Amaranthaceae.
So you might, if you're looking around,
you might see both, reference to both...
Both families.
But I want to show you some that you may not know
are related to beet.
So we've got spinach.
That's in the Amaranthaceae with beet.
Amaranth.
Celosia.
And everybody's favorite weeds,
Pigsweed and Lamb's Quarters in the top right.
And so if you're ever weeding and when they're really small,
and you think, gosh those Lamb's Quarters
look an awful lot like my beet seedlings.
It's because, yes, they do look very similar
and that's because they are--
They're related, okay.
So one thing that I do want to point out
that I also think is kind of cool,
because I like knowing stories behind plants,
is I want to point out the Amaranth,
that brightly colored pink seed head
in the bottom right-hand corner.
So, Amaranth is something
we grow around here ornamentally.
It can be really striking.
And another thing that you might not know
is that this crop has an ancient history.
It was grown as a grain.
It was domesticated in South and Central America,
India and Southeast Asia.
And this plant, you can take the seed heads
from these ancient varieties that they grew.
They harvested them. They processed them.
And then they were used as a nutritious high-protein grain.
So it's another cool example
of an ornamental with this cool story behind it
that has an edible history.
I just get excited when there's...
when there's more to a plant than you think.
All right, so.
I'd feel a little bad if I let you leave today
without an anatomy lesson.
What is a beet really?
What you're seeing on the screen,
I'm going to walk you through kind of
a brief botanical look at the beet
so you know exactly what you're dealing with this season.
So...
This is a golden beet.
And it's got a really nice tennis-ball shape there
and that is a swollen taproot.
That's root tissue.
But also that little rat tail like structure going down,
that is the taproot, too.
And that helps anchor the beet to the ground
and oftentimes you're going to see this little fibrous
roots coming off from the taproot
and that also helps aide the beet in water
and nutrient absorption.
You can't see the leaves here. They're off screen.
But connecting the leaves to the rest of the beet
are the petioles,
and you can see that here they're yellow.
They're usually, they're brightly pigmented.
And ...
Another cool botanical and anatomical thing
about the beet that I want to let you know about
is the presence of something
that's not a terrifically common tissue type,
but it's called supernumerary cambia.
All right, want that one more time?
(audience laughing)
Supernumerary cambia.
And what that is is you can see it.
This beet has been sliced through here
and you're holding it open like that
and you can see the concentric rings there.
This is a Chioggia beet or a Candy Cane beet,
some people call it.
It's really obvious here because the different rings
have different pigment.
But what that is, supernumerary cambia,
is concentric rings of cambia tissue.
Cambia tissue is a plant tissue type
that, it's kind of responsible for growth.
These cells grow and divide.
So as they're growing and dividing,
you're adding more cells, it gets bigger.
So cambia helps it to grow.
And so that's just a unique tissue type
and you can see this--
It doesn't have to be a Candy Cane beet.
You can cut them all and you can kind of see this supernumerary cambia
that is a distinctive hallmark of the Table beet.
Now, has anyone grown their own beet seed in here?
A couple, okay, cool.
If not, you're in for a treat, in my opinion.
So when you're growing it in your garden for a vegetable,
you're only going to get that first season in.
You're not going to take it to two seasons
to try to grow seed, to try to make seed.
Unless, of course, it's a really bad stressful year,
you know, heat, drought.
In that instance you may see a beet flower
or send up its flower stalk.
And what you're looking at here
is a flower stalk on a yellow beet
and so you can picture the beet in the ground
and the flower stalk just goes straight up.
This one hasn't--
a lot of the flowers haven't opened yet,
so it's kind of earlier on.
But here's a really up-close picture of the beet flower.
Beet flowers.
So think of a lot of our ornamental flowering plants,
those that have big bright bombastic flowers.
Those plants are investing their energy
in producing these really beautiful, bright,
colorful, advertisements to pollinators.
Beets don't invest their energy in that
because they're wind pollinated.
So they, instead, invest their energy in making
a ton of flowers that can produce a ton of pollen
that the wind can carry to another plant.
Beets are self-incompatible, meaning that if I'm a beet plant
and I have a flower on me, the pollen from my flower can't
go to another flower on me and pollinate it.
It has to go to another person,
or another beet plant's flower.
So beet,
and the pollen can fly vast distances on the wind.
Beet fields need to be isolated by up to a kilometer.
That's about 2/3 of a mile
because the pollen can go that far on a breeze
and you know if you're growing beet seed intentionally,
you don't want to kind of mismatch your pollen
and get a beet plant that you didn't intend to get.
And I mentioned that they're self-incompatible,
meaning they can't pollinate themselves
and that's in general too.
But plant breeders at the University of Wisconsin
were actually able-- discovered a way
to make them self-compatible,
meaning that a flower on me
could pollinate a flower on me
and the result of that was the ability to create
new and different breeding systems for beet
that results in hybrid beet production,
beet seed production as well.
So when pollination occurs you get seed.
So those little balls on there,
that's a beet, what we call a beet seed.
But a beet seed is actually a package deal.
So there are anywhere between one and five beet plants
contained in one of those quirky looking things.
Commonly you'll see two to three.
And so the seed is actually a seed ball.
And it forms when the flowers--
I mean you could see it a little
on that closeup picture prior
with all those flowers close together.
As pollination occurs and the seeds are set and growing,
it'll fuse down as it dries down,
and fuse together.
And then it'll produce that quirky substance
that you see there, that brown substance.
So it's multiple plants per seed.
And this characteristic as you see on the screen
is called multigerm.
And so,
consequently if you're planting multigerm seed
and you plant it in your garden
and what a surprise,
you have way more beets than you bargained for.
You will need to thin.
And you might also be wondering,
hey, is there such a thing as a
one seed per round ball I put in the ground
and yes, there are.
That characteristic is called monogerm.
And this is
a lot more important especially like in sugar beet,
which is heavily--
It's an ergonomic crop and it's heavily mechanized.
So you need that type of precision.
So, you know one plant per seed
versus a variable amount.
But there are garden beet cultivars
that are monogerm.
You just have to look for it.
It'll say it in your seed catalog.
Otherwise a lot of the ones that you're going to
plant in your garden are going to be multigerm.
So if you're a gardener like me, you buy a packet of seeds,
you plop it in, see what happens.
But some people prefer to do a more competent job
and want to know how to actually grow these beets.
So, I'm going to give you a couple of tips here.
I'm sure a lot of you already know them.
So beets like a nice loamy light,
well-drained soil, and this is especially true
during germination.
And if you have clay soils,
so what can happen is
if you have the surface of the soil
get wet and then dry,
it'll crust over.
And the baby beet seeds are going to be
seedlings are going to be knocking on the ceiling
trying to get through
and they can't because of that crusting.
So you want to try to avoid that.
You can do this by trying to keep the soil,
you know, moist throughout.
But don't overdo it.
You don't want to subject the seedlings.
You don't want to drown them. You don't want damping off.
So be reasonable about that,
but try to keep it moist to avoid that issue.
You can fertilize,
but I always recommend doing so according to a soil test
and proceeding based on what that says.
And I already mentioned the thinning aspect of this.
Seedlings will need to be thinned
because if you're planting a multigerm seed
because you're going to have more than you bargained for.
And you want to aim for
two inches between each plant.
So in terms of planting times,
beets like cooler temperatures,
so you can start thinking of planting your beets
as early as a month before the final frost.
But I've planted them
as late as even early June.
This is a great crop to do a multiple planting of.
You can do one earlier in the season
and then later to have a fall crop.
You can do this for-- If you're growing Swiss chard
you can do that as well if you wish.
When you harvest stuff
that's gone through the heat of the summer,
especially if you're eating your beet greens too,
or your Swiss chard leaf crop, those are going to be a little,
little less palatable in the heat of the summer.
And beets that,
beet roots that you are going to eat and harvest
in the dead of summer might be a little woodier
because of the temperature.
And this seems kind of self-explanatory,
but weeding is important.
Especially when they're so little.
They don't need that competition from other plants.
They don't need to out-compete them for resources.
That's not gonna help anything.
The nice thing about beets though,
is once they start to canopy out,
you know those big beautiful leaves,
they're going to be doing your job for you.
They will suppress a lot of,
fair amount of weed growth with the shade they provide
with their big leaves.
So hopefully that works out for you
and you get stunning roots like these.
But a lot of times,
that doesn't happen for people.
And so the number one thing
that people come and talk to me about beets,
they'll come and they'll say to me,
and I hope this is none of you in here,
because I know I've talked to someone today
who we had this exact conversation.
They'll say to me,
"My beets didn't make roots, why?"
And so this is the list I run through with them
of the general culprits
you could try to correct for next year.
And sometimes I wonder when they're like, "Oh I did it all."
I'm like, did you really? Are you sure?
So first, water.
Did you make sure that they got enough water?
You know when the plant needs water is it--
Imagine that growing beet root. There's a lot of water in there.
It needs water to be able to take up
to add mass to itself.
They need about an inch a week.
But, you know,
I've grown them in drought years as well
and still gotten roots.
But water is something to pay attention to.
Thinning, did you actually make sure to thin?
If, as you can imagine,
if you've got a really crowded stand,
there's not room to grow and enlarge.
They're going to be knocking into each other
and that's going to affect how big they get.
Fertilizing, this is also a common one.
If you are adding too much nitrogen,
what you're telling the beet to do is
put on big beautiful vegetative growth.
Some people will say,
"Oh yeah, I've got these great looking leaves but no roots."
That might be the reason why.
So, you know,
depending on what you're putting on there
and what you're encouraging the beet to do.
Are you encouraging it to vegetatively grow?
You don't want to necessarily do that too much.
Also, cultivar.
And this might be kind of almost experimental for you
and anecdotal.
But there are certain cultivars
that I have had very little luck growing
to produce good roots.
One of the ones that's really common and really gorgeous
is Bull's Blood.
It produces this really beautiful purple leaf
that's really great ornamentally.
I mean it's fantastic.
But I've never been able to produce
good-sized pretty roots.
I do get roots,
but not the big ones that I'd hoped for
that would be very nice for peeling and eating.
Also, there are some cultivars
that are not going to get that tennis-ball shape.
So there's one, for example,
called Cylindra, which is a cylindrical beet.
So just make sure you know what you're growing.
And if you're having a little trouble with one cultivar,
try another one.
There are a lot of really great open pollinated cultivars
and hybrid cultivars that you can try
and see what works for you.
Soil we've already talked about but that's another culprit.
If you have a clay soil, that might be an issue,
especially early on during germination time
if the soil crusts over.
And finally, sunlight.
This also seems kind of obvious,
but are you making sure that they're getting full sun?
You know, six hours or whatever a day.
Or are they kind of impartial sun?
Because that's what they need in order to--
You know, the leaves that
in order to produce that sugar to store in the root.
So, overall though,
I have found that beets are pretty easy to grow.
And most people have some good luck doing it.
I mean, even my two-year-old
can take a handful of seeds
and kind of smear them around
and we still end up getting beets.
So, now that we've talked about how to grow them,
I want to talk about the two other things
that I love about the story of this vegetable
and that's color and taste.
So let's start with the color.
So as you know, beets have this vibrant amazing color.
And I don't really feel like a picture,
picture on the screen is going to do that justice.
So, take a little trip in your mind now to your kitchen
and imagine you're cutting open that beet
and that red pigment,
and if there's water,
a drop of that water with that pigment gets anywhere.
It's intense, it's vibrant.
There's nothing like it I think.
And what you're looking at here on the screen,
on the left is some ground up red beet.
And as that really vibrant violet red color
and on the right is a ground up yellow beet.
And the pigments that are responsible
for all that color are called betalain pigments.
And the pigment for that makes the red pigment
is called Betacyanin,
and the pigment that does yellow is Betaxanthin.
And these plant pigments are stored in the vacuole
of the plants cell.
You're looking at an electron micrograph there
of a plant cell
and that big white area there is called the vacuole.
That's a membrane browned organelle
where the plant stores water, toxins,
small organic molecules and pigments.
And ...
these pigments are found in flowers, fruits,
as well as some vegetative tissues.
And these pigments are found exclusively in one plant order.
And remember order refers to
kingdom, phylum, order.
I got to think back.
You get what I'm saying.
I can normally do the acronym in my head but I'm failing,
but you know all the way down to species.
So order is kind of,
it's not as broad of a classification as--
Classification is how we classify living things,
how we put them into organized groups.
Kingdom's pretty broad. Species is super specific.
Order is kind of in the middle here,
so it contains a fair number of living things.
But the only plant order that contains these pigments,
is called Caryophyllales.
That's how you say that really neat word at the top.
It rolls off your tongue pretty well.
Caryophyllales.
And what's interesting about that,
is that all other plant pigments
are kind of ubiquitous across the board.
You know other plants will have,
or other orders have
all these other plant pigments in common,
but this plant order is the only one
that contains these vibrant pigments.
Why? I don't know. It's a mystery.
And here are some common ornamental plants
that these pigments are found in:
Celosia, four o'clocks,
moss flower, and bougainvilleas.
So, also, obviously in the beet.
And these are the pigments
in the petioles and mid-veins of leaf crops
like Swiss chard
or also in the beet greens
responsible for the pigment there
in the petiole and the veins.
And you might be thinking,
"Okay, well if I've got a red beet,
"I've got the red pigment, and if I've got a yellow beet,
"I've got the yellow pigment", right?
Well not quite true.
If you've got the red beet,
it actually has both pigments.
It's got in a ratio of three parts red to one part yellow.
And you don't see the yellow
because the vibrant red pigment masks it.
But a yellow beet,
that has the genetic makeup such that
it cannot produce the red pigment.
It just produces the yellow pigment.
And then there's the white beet.
Do we have any fans of Blankoma, the white beet in here?
Keep your hands down. Oh, we have one, I'm sorry.
I'm going to slander it now.
Then there's the white beet
which has the genetic makeup such
that it does not produce any pigments.
Why you would grow such a beet, I don't know.
(audience laughing)
And this pigment is also found
as a food colorant.
So in the late 70s interest arose
in finding an alternative
to synthetically produced food dyes.
So they started looking at Table beet.
But the issue with that is you've got this root that's,
yes, filled with pigment, but also water and sugar.
You have to distill that pigment down,
get rid of that other stuff.
And that takes time and it costs a lot of money.
So it was cost prohibitive to use.
So breeding efforts were undertaken
at the University of Wisconsin
and what they-- over a number of years--
what they were doing was breeding
for a concentrated pigment in a beet.
And they were successful,
so much so that by, when it was last looked at in 2008,
it was only two and a half times more expensive
to produce food dye from these betalain pigments
than its synthetic counterpart, which is really a success story.
And if these natural food dyes
are going to be found in things that are not heated.
It breaks down when it's heated.
But it's found like everywhere now.
I mean, you can look in powdered drink mixes,
cosmetics, meat products, yogurts, ice creams.
I mean, I looked. I was surprised.
I saw beet juice used as food dye in frozen salmon patties
the other day.
Who would have thought?
But they're in little fish crackers.
Go to your store, you'll be surprised.
The beet is everywhere.
So I would argue that
people associate beets with this bright red color
and that the second thing that people associate with beets
is the taste.
Not a lot of people would disagree with me on that.
And a lot of people say that beets taste like dirt.
Hence the picture of the fork in the soil there.
And they're not that far from the truth.
I'm going to tell you why.
So beets contain a taste and aroma compound
called geosmin.
So geosmin is a volatile compound
and what volatile means is that
it's able to go from being in the liquid state
and it likes to go and be in the gas state.
It does that very easily,
going from being in a liquid to in a gas state.
So geosmin is a volatile compound
that gives the beet
its characteristic earthy taste and aroma.
And the reason that people associate this flavor with soil
is because this compound is also found in soil.
Or more specifically,
in the microorganisms that are prevalent there.
So you may have heard this before
that soil is full of life.
If you take a teaspoon of soil it's amazing.
There's about a billion bacteria,
four million fungi,
and bunch of other stuff.
Chock full of life.
And so the microorganisms that are in that soil,
some of them manufacture geosmin,
this compound in them and then when they die they release it.
And so remember it's volatile so it likes to go
from being in a liquid state to being in a gas state.
So it's coming off and we can smell it.
So when you're out there digging in your garden
after a nice rain has happened
a couple days ago, you're turning it over,
you get that really strong fresh soil smell.
Well geosmin is one of the main contributors to that aroma.
And it's also in beets.
So there's been research done
to determine if the beet is producing this
endogenously on its own
or if it's somehow assimilating it
through an association with other microorganisms.
And research has supported the idea
that beets are able to produce
this compound by themselves
but there's also the possibility that other microorganisms
and their associations may
have something to do with this process.
And there are specific research studies looking at this.
But it's also kind of interesting to think about.
A carrot for example, it grows in a very similar way.
It grows in the ground surrounded by soil.
No geosmin, no earthy flavor.
So why the beet? Why does the beet have this?
This earthy compound. I don't know.
(audience laughing)
And we are super-duper sensitive to it.
We can detect it at 10-20 parts geosmin
per trillion parts of water
which is kind of hard to fathom.
That's very sensitive.
And because of that,
it's considered a contaminant.
So it's been found in water,
cheeses, beans, fishes and wines.
Although with wines,
with earthier wines I should say,
it's not necessarily considered a contaminant,
it's considered part of contributing
to the overall flavor profile.
So it's kind of a positive in terms of that.
And geosmin isn't a toxicological threat
as a contaminant.
But it's more of an issue because of the
flavor and aroma it imparts.
If you're going to your tap and you get some water
and it smells like dirt,
you're going to be a little concerned.
So that's why it's considered a contaminant.
So it also makes sense that when it's in a beet,
some people might feel like they're eating dirt
and they might really hate that for some reason.
But some people really love it and want more of it.
So when I was in graduate school,
one of the things I looked at
was a bunch of different cultivars
to see what beets had higher levels of geosmin
and what beets had lower levels of geosmin.
And besides just being interesting to know,
this type of information is basic information
that you need in order to start breeding for beets
with higher or lower levels of this compound.
So what I had to do was grow a bunch of different beets
in a couple locations over a couple of years,
take a bunch of samples and run them through
a very fascinating and fancy machine
called a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer.
And what that machine does is it measures volatile compounds
at very small concentrations.
So you can imagine having like a glass vial
with some ground up beet,
like a beet milkshake in the bottom.
And the geosmin that's in the liquid beet
would kind of come up.
You can't see it, but it's existing
in the gas state at the top of the vial.
And I could measure those very small levels of that
that gas essentially with this machine.
So what I found out
was that the beet that I looked at
that produced the lowest amount of geosmin
was a golden beet called Touchstone Gold.
And the two of the beets that generally produce
the higher levels of geosmin
were Bull's blood, which we talked about earlier,
and it's in that purple foliage on the top of the screen,
so Bull's Blood and Chioggia,
the Candy Cane beet,
as well as sugar beet that I grew.
So this was interesting,
and also anecdotally this was interesting
because people will come up to you and say, you know,
"Oh, the yellow beets, they're I like them more.
"They're sweeter."
Well, are they necessarily sweeter?
Or maybe people reacting to a lower geosmin level?
It doesn't taste as earthy. It doesn't taste like dirt.
So people think it's sweeter.
I don't know, maybe you can identify with that
in your beet eating.
And finding out this information
helped me to initiate some breeding populations
for higher and lower levels of geosmin
and that work is still being continued today
in Dr. Irwin Goldman's carrot, onion,
and beet breeding lab.
And you're actually seeing a picture on the screen there
from a winter nursery, winter breeding nursery,
in the greenhouse for breeding beets.
And for those of you who really, really
don't like that earthy flavor,
there is a small sliver of hope.
Cooking has been shown to decrease the content of geosmin
by up to 66%.
So that's like steaming or boiling.
But remember we are very very sensitive to it.
So you still may hate them
because they taste like dirt still to you.
And for that small subsection of people,
hopefully you can get aboard the beet train
by eating the greens.
So...
As beets have kind of enjoyed a Renaissance
over the past number of years,
you can definitely find more beet greens
in salad mixes for example.
They're harvested
when they're about six to nine centimeters long
and you can harvest them
off of your own plants and eat them.
You can saut? them like you do chard,
or you can use them in a salad as well.
And because of that beautiful pigment in there,
they add a really nice splash of color.
So I'd like to wrap things up by now
and in a minute we'll take any questions.
So today we've talked about
some of my favorite topics about the beet.
We talked about the domestication,
the members of its family,
we had a very brief anatomy lesson,
we talked about how to grow it,
how to not grow it,
its color, and its earthiness.
And today I hope you're going to be leaving
thinking about this vegetable
as fascinating, even if you can't stand to eat it.
And because I consider this a love story,
and we're days away from Valentine's Day here,
I'm going to end with a little
love poem
dedicated to my favorite vegetable.
(audience laughing)
Beets are red and yellow too,
I can't wait to grow them in my garden this year.
You'll join me, won't you?
(audience laughing)
Thank you very much.
(audience clapping)