Roast Beetroots, Pistachio Butter & Crispy Garlic

For the beetroots:

1. Preheat your oven to 180 C fan/200 C/400 F/gas mark 6.
2. Remove any leaves from the beetroots, saving them for use as a chard/spinach alternative.
3. Put the whole beetroots into a roasting tin and dress them with the olive oil and vinegar before adding the sugar and seasoning liberally. Add the water to the tin and cover with a sheet of baking paper before covering with foil. Bake the beets for around 2 hours, or until completely tender to a knife or skewer.
4. When you’re happy with the beets, remove from the oven, take off the foil and paper, and allow them to cool until you can just touch them. The best way to remove the skin is with your hands when they are still warm, but if you don’t want purple hands for the foreseeable, I’d recommend putting some rubber gloves on. You should be able to slide the skin off easily just by pushing it – if not, the beets aren’t cooked enough.
5. Put the peeled beetroots back into the cooking liquid as you peel them, then cut into wedges or bitesize pieces any shape you care for. A mixture of different shapes means lots of angles for sauce retention. Put the chopped beetroot into a mixing bowl.
6. Strain the cooking liquid through a sieve and then taste it. Depending on how intensely flavourful it is, you can use some, or all of it, to dress the beetroots. Ultimately, we want a nice balance of fat, salt, sweet and acid, all of which can be adjusted at this point through the addition of more oil, salt, sugar or vinegar, respectively.
7. Once dressed, the beets can be placed in a container with a lid and kept in the fridge for up to 2 days ahead of your dinner party, easing the workload across the menu. When you come to serve the beets, just make sure they’ve had some time to come up to room temperature – they will be more flavourful for it.

For the pistachio butter:

1. Preheat your oven to 160 C fan/180 C/350 F/gas mark 4.
2. Put the pistachios on a baking tray and dress them lightly with a little of the neutral oil.
3. Season with salt and roast in the oven until lightly coloured and the pungency of the aroma is heightened. This will take 15-20 minutes, depending on your oven. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.
4. In a dry frying pan over medium heat, toast off the caraway seeds, moving them around the pan continuously for a minute or so to allow the oils to come to the fore. Grind the seeds in a spice grinder, if you have one, or use a pestle and mortar. Grinding the seeds isn’t essential, but I think it makes the final texture of the pistachio butter better.
5. Add the nuts and ground caraway seeds to a blender and slowly add the neutral oil, blending until it comes together to form a rich purée. You might not need all of the oil, adding it slowly gives you control over the consistency of the emulsion. Ideally there will be a little texture left – imagine an almost-smooth peanut butter.
6. The pistachio butter can be kept in the fridge in a lidded container for quite a long time – around 2-3 weeks – so you can make it whenever you like and be ahead of the game for your dinner party. Making extra is not a bad thing – expensive, for sure, because of the pistachios, but it’s truly delicious and you’re going to want more it. 

For the crispy garlic:

1. Start by slicing your garlic thinly and uniformly. The best tool for this is a Japanese mandolin, but it can be done by hand with a knife, it just requires focus and consideration. We need the slices to be of an even thickness in order that they colour and crisp at a similar rate.
2. Set up a baking tray with a piece of kitchen paper to absorb the oil when the garlic has been fried.
3. Pour the oil into a saucepan until it is roughly 1.5cm (½in) deep. Add the garlic and turn the heat on. Stir continuously until it turns a light golden colour. The garlic will continue to cook after removing it from the oil, so be careful not to take it too far at this stage.
4. Remove the garlic with a slotted spoon and spread it out over the kitchen paper. The garlic will continue to cook for some time because of the residual heat, so it’s important that it is spread out evenly to allow it to cool as quickly as possible.
5. Once cool, it will be nice and crisp and can be kept in an airtight container lined with kitchen paper for a couple of days before getting soft. If it’s particularly humid, I’d recommend frying the garlic on the day of serving – humidity is your enemy when trying to create crispy textures.

To finish:

1. As the beetroots have already been dressed, they shouldn’t require much attention but have a taste and if you think they need a little lift you can season them in a bowl. I’d recommend dressing them with a bit of their cooking liquid to start, adding some salt if required, and then building from there. 
2. Spread at least 1 heaped tablespoon per person of pistachio butter on a plate and then place the dressed beetroots on top. Finish with the crispy garlic and mint leaves.