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I've just read a blog post from Amass restaurant. I got very curious about roasting beetroot in coffee grounds as they said in the article. Looking a bit further, I've also found an article by Amass' chef, Matt Orlando, where he gave us a bit more detail on it:

We roast beetroot in the grinds and dry them until they are rock hard. Then we juice some other beets (saving the pulp for kombucha) and reduce this with used tea leaves from the restaurant service. We rehydrate the dried coffee grind-roasted beets in the beet and tea reduction and they end up having a wonderful toffee texture.

Inspired by this, I thought about baking small beetroots (and maybe carrots too) using the salt crust technique, but replacing salt by coffee. I'm thinking about trying using egg whites in one of them, and in the other just burying the beets on the grinds. I'm just a bit afraid that the grinds might burn during the cooking. Anyone has ever tried replacing salt in the crust with something else? I would love some advice from some more seasoned cooks to make this work.

Ms Designer
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illichosky
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1 Answers1

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The burning will mostly be due to the absorption of infrared radiation by the very darkly-colored grounds, similar to how toast goes from white to brown slowly but brown to burnt very quickly.

If you keep the oven at a reasonable temperature (probably less than 340F) and wrap it in foil shiny side out (vented or not up to you, probably sealed for aroma is best) then you will create a high humidity environment with no radiant burning.

This will take longer but will probably give you the desired results. If it's too soggy, you can add salt (which doesn't need to touch the food, it can be in a cheesecloth bag separate from the beets) to absorb moisture or you can vent the foil.

The good news is that you can run small trial runs because the time/ingredients are relatively cheap. Do one first in this way and please let me know how it goes, cool concept.

William Engels
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