Red Beet Salad with Berbere Spices and Olive Oil

I cannot figure out how my gourmet life was before I started discovering spices. Most probably it was undernourished, bland, unattractive and tasteless. For someone like me, with a complicated personal history to foods, that pinch of spice added to a plate dramatically changed the taste for good. Spices create unforgettable taste memories that stay with you at least until the next spicy experiment. The more I explore this world of flavors and fragrances, the more I realize how infinite the possibilities of matching and combining are.

As this year I was selected as one of the brand ambassador for the multi-awarded Spice Kitchen UK, my newly discovered passion for spices got a professional direction, as I have to work hard to combine the flavors with usual foods I am using regularly in my kitchen. The experiences are unique, as it gives a completely new life to foods that I was very reluctant to try and prepare before. For instance, red beet. My Eastern European heritage didn't change the fact that I simply cannot stand the smell of it. As for the taste, I find it completely bland - boring, in literary terms - therefore, on the list of 'you better no bother to bring them at home'. Anyway, boiling and preparing them may involve a lot of red traces as...they are called red beets  for a reason. I love a good cold borscht, but preferably prepared by my Russian/Ukrainian friends.

All being said, have no idea what happened to me to decide spontaneoulsy yesterday to purchase some little round dirty looking red beets. Maybe the fact that I haven't created anything worth in my kitchen for a long while, or that the Jewish New Year, the Rosh Hashanah is approaching and needed to boost a bit my creativity? Not sure, but I decided to make the effort and brought the small little something at home. A salad - with olive oil, mint and salt - was an easy solution, but I was looking for something more memorable, able to create those food memories that I may long for in my non-foodie moments. 

As usual in such situation, a look into my spices' cabinet always helps. This time, I wanted a perfect spice, which challenges the original down-to-earth taste of the beets. Aleppo Pepper was a bit too simple while the sumac with its fruity waves was not strong enough to add something to the original taste and the risk was that it gets simply lost into the strong beets flavor. Couple of more minutes of deliberation and I finally set for for Berbere, a spice that I didn't explored too much until now. An basic ingredient in the Ethiopian and Eritrean kitchen, it adds hotness to the meals, with its exquisite combination of: chili pepper, garlic, ginger, basil, nigelly, fenugreek, onion cardamom. A fantastic mix that promised to alter and enrich the red beet.

Once everything was settled, let's start the hard spicy work!

Ingredients

4 small red beets

1 tablespoon olive oil

1/2 teaspoon Berbere spice

Directions

Peel the beets. Add them to hot boiling salty water and let them to boil until tender. Once ready, cut it into small slices. Add the olive oil and mix. Spread the Berbere spice and mix. Let it rest at least 20 minutes before serving. Serve it either at the room temperature or cooled in the fridge.

The result: mindblowing! It kept from the original red beet flavor the sweetness and added it to the hotness of the other ingredients. This modest salad was a star at my table. Although I used it as a started, it goes very well as a side dish for salmon or for various mets.

Serves: 2

Preparation time: 10 minutes

Cooking time: The beets need at least one hour to boil properly. 

Bon Appétit!