Maybe it's the beets? Maybe your stove isn't as hot as you think it is? Did you see bubbles? Considering the time, I'm thinking you either solve it, or put it away to worry about in the morning. If the latter, sitting in the broth may have helped the beets?

plllog, I forgot to mention that before the beets were set to simmer, the pot was brought to a boil. After that, I was pretty careful to make sure that the beets were simmering, as in a bubble breaking the surface from time to time. When they weren’t soft after an hour, I increased the heat a bit. After an hour of increased heat (bringing total cooking time to 2 hours), I brought them back up to a boil and boiled them covered for about 20 minutes.

Even though I said above that they had cooked for 2+ hours, I think it was probably closer to 3 hours.

As things currently stand, with all the boiling even though I’ve added a bit of water from time to time, the liquid has reduced to the point that if I try to purée this mess, it is going to be more of a paste than a soup. I have all the ingredients in the house to make Dorie Greenspan’s Potato Chowder. I’m going to pitch the beets and make the potato chowder!

If refrigerated, sweet potatoes will turn hard. Is it possible that there is some similar storage issue with beets?

For soup I usually roast mine first.

Beets will take much longer than all your other ingredients so I'm a bit surprised they are added last. Either your pot was not up to a simmer like mentioned or the beets were to large a cut. A smaller dice would surely cook tender in 45min.

So you did have a simmer. Strange. And that would make the whole pot overcooked on the burner that long.

I keep my beets in the fridge so that's not it. I've had some veg do weird things but never beets.

Glad you tossed it but I would be pissed, lol.

I'm wondering what 'al dente' looks like in beets? They will never dissolve into mush like a potato would.

Yeah, sleevendog, me too! I hate when I spend my time making a dish to have it not turn out. I also hate that I wasted the money on it, but at least with these ingredients, it wan’t that much. I agree that “diced” would have been better instructions than “cut into chunks.”

Roasting first is probably a good idea, but one of the few “rules” of our cookbook group is that you must follow the directions exactly. And I did. :-(

Carolb, “al dente” was the closest I could come up with to describe the texture. The centers of the chunks were still resistant to the bite. Perhaps, “tender crisp” would be a better description. When I stuck a sharp knife in them, the knife would not easily pierce the center. They were cooked through but not soft. And certainly not soft enough to purée into something smooth.

How big were the beets?

In the light of day, thinking about all the beets I've cooked, the small ones are a lot more tender, and the very large ones, like carrots, tend to get woody.

I'm glad you changed plan for your group lunch. That's just the best thing to do under the circumstances. If you kept the beet stuff, you could use it as the base for a nice, long braise. Add some white wine or vinegar and maybe a chili pepper, and enough water to fill the pot to halfway up the sides of a tougher cut of meat, cover, and cook low and slow for a few hours. Should be delicious.

I keep beets in the fridge and haven't had issues, but also don't cook them very frequently. I also keep sweet potatoes in the fridge and haven't had issues.

The recipe called for “5 medium beets.” I would guess these were about the size of a tennis ball. There were some in the bin as big as softballs. I’m sure your idea of using them as part of a braise would be delicious, but at the point, I’m going to cut my losses and throw them out!

I’m just a tad frustrated. We are out of town for 2 days because of an ill relative. My plan was to make the soup on Monday evening, travel Tuesday and Wednesday, and go to the luncheon on Thursday. Now I’m going to be cooking soup on Wednesday night after I get home. Grrrr.....

Any chance you have a pressure cooker or Instant pot?

If so, you could try that for 15 to 20 minutes or so.

Ouch! I hope your relative is doing better!

I have seen the softballs, but never tried to handle one. To me, tennis ball is pretty big, though not unheard of. I think the ones we usually get are more the size of handballs (the unsurety being handballs--I know the size of the beets). We also get baby beets which are a pain to clean, but really delicious. Or, I should say, pink sugar. :) Those are about the size of a ball in an old fashioned mechanical pinball machine. I've used tennis balls, but only in slow baked mixed roots where I've chosen them for the lesser amount of cleaning and peeling. They're not speedy cookers, but in bitesized chunks are cooked through (roasted) in a similar time to rutabagas, celeriac, potatoes, et al.

Do you think you could get one of your friends to help get the soup started?

Big beets are tough. Have to use pressure cooker, or cut into small pieces and boil, or dice then microwave first then boil. If you're going to puree them anyway, the fastest might be to shred in food processor then boil. Sorry about your soup!

2 things here.....once water boils, as in bubbles breaking the surface, no matter how high you turn the flame and how fast and furiously it boils, it doesn't get any hotter....fast boiling cooks no faster than a gentle simmer>
and beets can get woody even if they are not huge...they are fibrous and pretty nasty!
and I have had softball sized beets that were perfectly tender....think it's something to do with available moisture in that they get woody before they get big.

The beets went out with the trash this morning. I was afraid to put them down the disposer after several of you used the term “woody.” I’ve already paid for the plumber’s child’s college education with things I’ve put down the disposer. I didn’t want to start work on his graduate degree!

I made the Potato Chowder with Lots of Variations. My variation was to use sweet potatoes and omit the optional cream.

For any of you who may have Everyday Dorie, our meal started with Pimento Cheese as an appetizer; Cowboy Caviar salad; Lower East Side Tart was the main course. Our side dish was Sweet and Smoky Roasted Carrots. The sauce made this dish. After lunch, I was sneaking swipes of the sauce off the serving dish as I helped out hostess load the dishwasher. The dessert was Dark Chocolate Pudding. The recipe had an option to incorporate Chocolate Crunch. It totally made the dish.

This is our first month with the new cookbook. I was very pleased with the recipes.

So funny! When I lived in Berkeley, my auto mechanic once took me to lunch. We met at his shop. His son was there - it was a family business. He introduced me to his boy as "the man who's putting you through school".

Hm... The beets I get almost always are sold in bunches with the leaves on. The really large ones aren't. Perhaps the smaller ones I associated with tenderness, were actually nice because of the stems. Until Linda said, I'd never met a softball sized tender beet. I've cooked them, on occasion, but that's roasted for more than an hour at 350-375 F.

Bbstx, I'm glad the sweet potato soup, and the whole meal, came out well! Which kind of sweet potato did you use?

Annie,

Interesting info about the tops being indicative of freshness. I know that what you say is true, of course, but I never thought about it. I cook beets maybe once a year, so I’m not very well versed in choosing good beets. These had no tops at all on them. And I’ve never seen anything so dirty as these beets were! There were some small golden beets with tops. But the recipe called for red beets, so red beets I must buy!

plllog, Remember I live in the sticks. It was just a section of sweet potatoes at one of the 2 groceries in town. They were the usual sweet potato color. Nothing fancy.

Garnets? Reddish skin outside, orange flesh inside?

My problem is that I don't know anything about what there is in the sticks in Texas. Texas is the home of Whole Foods, after all. :) I kind of thought you'd mention if you'd gone purple, but I also kind of thought you might have done white since you were subbing for regular potatoes (with recipe "variations" approval). Both of which are available year round, as far as I can tell, at WF here.

Not that any of that matters. You held up your end, and it came out well. How are your relatives doing? How are you? Any chance to breathe yet?

This is what I used. It has the ordinary orange flesh. If there is such a thing as a plain ol’ common sweet potato, I think that is what this is. Regretfully, our closest Whole Foods is an hour and a half away. We are nearly falling off the edge of the earth! :-)

In the 5 years that our cookbook group has been together, we’ve had very few total fails where the preparer felt the need to start over. Mine may have been the second or third time. Actually, one of the group was pleased that I ditched the beet soup recipe. She isn’t a beets lover.

The relative is doing fairly well. He isn’t going to get over what he has but he seems to be past the latest rough patch.

I spent yesterday relaxing and reading. I did absolutely nothing constructive! It was a good day. Thanks for asking.

bbstx, I'm glad your relative is doing better and that you spent the day relaxing.

The thing about the tops is that they wilt. If the beet has fresh tops, it's freshly pulled. If it's a couple of days old, the tops will begin to wilt. If there are no tops, well, they could have been pulled 5 months ago!

That sweet potato is exactly the kind we see here. Just one kind, no colors, just orange sweet potatoes. Probably the Georgia Jet/Beauregard type, probably a hybrid of those types meant for production.

Both soups sound good to me.

And I thought I lived at the end of the earth. Other end, I guess. Once I was asked how to get to Marquette. I told them to drive north to the end of the earth. 4 miles past that they would find Marquette, LOL.

Annie

Yep...other end of the earth!

Annie, you said the beet soup recipe sounded good to you. I could not find it online to link here, but here it is basically.

Core and roughly chop 1 medium fennel bulb. Roughly chop 1 red onion or sweet onion. 2 cloves of garlic, germ removed. 3 sprigs of thyme. Slowly cook all in a bit of olive oil until wilted and softened. Salt and pepper to taste. Add 6 cups of chicken stock. Throw in 5 medium beets, peeled and cut into small chunks. Bring to a boil. Lower to a simmer. Cook partially covered for 45 minutes until the beets are easily pierced with a knife. Remove the herb stems. Purée the soup until silky. Can be served hot or cold. Can be made up to 3 days ahead.

Everyday Dorie is an excellent cookbook! I don’t think my failure had anything to do with the recipe. It was all on the beets!

FWIW, some varieties of beet are more prone to becoming woody, regardless of size. And the longer they're left to grow, the tougher they can get.

bbstyx, that sounds like something right up my alley, I'm definitely going to make that. I love beets and I love fennel and I have quarts of home canned chicken stock in the pantry.

I'm definitely a fan of Dorie Greenspan, she very seldom leads me wrong. Her recipes seem to be the type, we must have the same taste!

Annie

It beets me. I have no idea why you can't get your beets done the way you like.

But I agree, the PC will do the trick.

dcarch

Oh, Annie, you teach me more daily. The bunches of smaller beats with the pretty leaves have always looked more appealing to me but I never thought about the whole freshness issue, though I'm well aware that roots hold well and aren't always right out of the ground, etc. That explains so much! If they have perky leaves and stems, they're fresh and freshly pulled means tender and not dry. Cool.

Bbstx, your initial description didn't appeal, really. I'm not a fan of borscht, but the recipe in full sounds good. I got hung up on "core fennel". I finally figured out it meant cut out the rooty center on the bottom, as usual, right?

So glad to hear that things are getting better there and you got a day off! And so sorry to hear how far WF is from you! My friend who used to live in the hinterlands (not quite the edge of the world) of Texas was "only" an hour from the good WF, and they opened an okay one half way there. Plus, Texas has good produce and is near enough to so much Mexican export. Sigh. I think it's so odd that there's less the closer you get to where the food is grown (i.e., not in the paved over city).

I've seen that kind of sweet potato too. :) Thanks for the picture. :)

Actually, my favorite grocery of all time in Texas is Central Market. It is local to Texas; the upscale offshoot of HEB Groceries. It has a much wider selection, I think, than WF, but it still isn’t a full-on supermarket. As a friend of mine says, don’t go looking for cornflakes at CM.

I’m not a fennel aficionado. I do not care for licorice and fennel has a whiff of that flavor. I assumed “coring” the fennel meant cutting out the same part you’d cut out if you were coring a head of cabbage.

darch, a pressure cooker would have been against the “rules” of the group. Recipes must be cooked as written. I’ll have to admit, I don’t own one. They scare me. My mother always had a pressure cooker and she was always frightened of it, so I suppose its a fear I learned early. btw, she never had a pressure cooker blow up on her, but she always approached using it as if it were going to momentarily.

I also own Dorie’s Around My French Table. I’ve never cooked the first thing from it. And I can’t tell you why. I need to re-look at it.