Beetroot tartare with fake egg yolk | My Chef Recipe (2024)

• July 28, 2021
• Martin Schreiner
• One Comment

A vegetarian tartare – vegetables in the fast lane

The market for vegetarian meat substitutes is booming! But we often forget how diverse and rich the range of vegetables is. Unfortunately, we are still not used to cook with vegetables and for a lot of people vegetables are just a side dish and sometimes don’t go far beyond potatoes and a few lettuce leaves.

Vegetarian dishes are trendy, and even well-known gourmet restaurants are switching completely to vegetables. For example the 3-star restaurant “Eleven Madison Park” in New York, which has switched its kitchen to completely vegetarian.

I want to help you expand your repertoire of vegetarian recipes and show you how sexy vegetables can be. What could not be more obvious than a vegetarian tartare?

Due to its high vitamin B, potassium, iron and especially folic acid content, beetroot in its various colors and shapes is a very valuable and healthy vegetable. But beetroot is not only healthy, it is also extremely tasty and suitable for a wide variety of preparation methods, as well as perfect for a vegetarian tartare.

In this vegetarian tartare recipe we combine red and yellow beets with an orange sphere, Parmesan cream, sourdough crackers and cashew nuts. The Parmesan and sourdough combine perfectly with the beetroot and bring a full-bodied flavor, while the orange adds a refreshing citrus note.

If you don’t feel like making a molecular sphere or don’t have sourdough at home, you can of course just make a vegetarian tartare from beetroot. But in order to surprise your guests with something new, I would definitely recommend trying the orange spheres with the vegetarian tartare , which are really not complicated if you follow the instructions.

Recommended for you: Recipe for Vietnamese summer rolls

A healthy diet with more vegetables

Little by little, our thinking is changing and must also change if we want to turn our future on this planet into a success story. Few people doubt that we cannot just continue as before as if nothing had happened.

Factory farming is very profitable and profit-maximizing for a few, but the negative consequences for the environment and of course the animals are largely known. The health consequences for us humans are also known from numerous studies.

In order to change something, it is not enough just to switch to organic farming and take care of the wellbeing of the animals in farming. We also, as individuals, have to get used to simply eating less meat per person.

As part of a healthy diet, according to nutritionists, a small amount of meat can facilitate the supply of vital nutrients. Eating in an ecologically sustainable way means eating mainly plant-based foods.

If you want to read more about sustainable nutrition and a healthy diet, you can read the recommendations of the WHO (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/healthy-diet) or just skip this and go straight to the recipe of the vegetarian tartare 🙂

Molecular cuisine and one of the most famous components – the molecular spheres

The representatives of the molecular kitchen are asking themselves how we can use biochemical tools to transform our food into other forms or states of aggregation. Probably the best known among the top chefs who made molecular gastronomy world-famous is the Spanish chef Ferran Adrià. In his restaurant “El Bulli” on the Spanish Costa Brava, for years he did not offer any classic dishes, only those that were spectacularly modified with natural additives.

One of his most famous dishes is arguably the “fake olive” that has been copied thousands of times by chefs around the world. With the help of natural food additives, a gelled capsule “sphere” is formed that resembles a real olive and contains liquid olive puree inside. This sphere bursts in the mouth and gives a special taste experience, which also surprises with the changed texture.

One of the components in our vegetarian dish is the “false egg yolk“. What looks like an egg yolk, as found in a classic beef tartare, is actually a molecular sphere made of orange juice.

The technology behind it is really simple and does not require any special knowledge, you just have to use the right ingredients. To create a classic molecular sphere you need two ingredients – alginate and calcium chloride. Mix the main ingredient with alginate and then form the spheres in a bath with calcium chloride. This method is best when the spheres are consumed directly and do not need to be kept for too long.

For easier preparation, the indirect “reverse” spherification is mostly used nowadays. In this case, you mix the main ingredient with calcium chloride and then form the spheres in a bath with alginate. However, because calcium chloride is slightly bitter when consumed, calcium lactate is used instead.

All of these ingredients may sound strange, but they are completely natural additives that you can find as food additives in a wide variety of products in the supermarket.

In this recipe we use indirect spherification, and we also freeze the spheres beforehand in hemispherical silicone molds to give them the perfect shape. This makes the preparation even easier, and anyone can create a perfectly shaped molecular sphere.

The only thing that needs to be considered is the exact quantity, so it is advisable to use a precision balance. As almost always in the kitchen, the amount is decisive and the proportion or percentage of an ingredient can be converted to any amount.

In our case with indirect spherification in the molecular kitchen, the following proportions must be observed. Calcium lactate must be at least 2% of the mixture with the main ingredient. In order to produce the alginate bath, the proportion of alginate must be 0.5% of the water.

False egg yolk made from orange juice

Sourdough crackers – a simple and quick recipe for your sourdough discard

Anyone who regularly bakes with sourdough at home knows this problem. What to do with the sourdough excess or “discard” after you have fed your sourdough. It’s best to keep your surplus sourdough in a mason jar in the refrigerator. When a certain amount has been reached, one of the numerous recipes can be made.

One of our favorite recipes are sourdough crackers. They are not only the easiest and fastest sourdough recipe, but are also extremely digestible and always welcome as a snack or side dish and go perfectly with our recipe for a vegetarian tartare.

Quickly spread on a silicone mat or baking paper and put in the oven. You can try out this recipe with a wide variety of flavors. Just get creative and combine it with everything you like – garlic, sesame, chilli, smoked paprika powder, furikake, curry powder, … and the combine great with the vegetarian tartare

Here you can find further recipes on the subject of sourdough leftover utilization