Makes ~3 cups: 2 large servings or 4 medium.

Peel and then coarsely chop the onion and beets (½” by ½” sticks is good for the beets). Heat pressure cooker pot, add oil, sauté onions on medium-high heat for ~1 minute, then add beets and ½ cup water. Seal and bring to full 15 psi pressure. Reduce heat and cook 3 minutes at pressure, then quick release (with cold water in sink).

Allow to cool for at least 5 minutes, then transfer to blender. If you want a really thick soup, you don’t have to add any more water (at least with a Vitamix), but I would add at least ¼ cup of water. Blend on high until smooth, ~40 seconds. Salt to taste, then serve, garnish, and enjoy!

Many recipes use broth instead of water or add potatoes, but this recipe is quite good with just the beets and onion.

This soup is good both hot and cold. It goes well with some sourdough bread.

The less-tasty experiment: Browned Beets

While searching around for hints on pressure cooking beets I came across a carrot soup recipe that sounded interesting. If you add a little baking soda you can brown the carrots in a pressure cooker relatively quickly and develop interesting flavors (via the Maillard reaction). I also found some discussion of applying the same principle to onions, but much less discussion of beets.

I was unsure how the browned beets would come out, so I decided to blend up three soups: one 100% browned beets, one 100% lightly cooked, and one 50-50 mixture of the two. (I suspected that the mixture would have the best depth of flavor, but I wanted to test the full range of possibilities.)

I prepared the browned beets the same as above, but added 0.5% baking soda by weight, which came to just about a teaspoon. Then I cooked for 20 minutes at full pressure instead of the previous 3 minutes.

Not surprisingly, the beets came out of the pressure cooker more brown:

(3 minutes, no baking soda on the left; 20 minutes with baking soda on the right.)

The browned beets had an interesting browned smell, whereas the lightly cooked ones smelled more like beets.

After blending I poured out the three mixtures:

(100% lightly cooked, 50-50, and 100% browned)

I was surprised that blending brought the bright red color back to the browned beets. There was still a detectable difference in color, but it was much less pronounced than before blending. I regret that the lighting in the photo above is not perfectly uniform, but you can still see the slight difference in color.

The first bite of the browned beet soup was tasty. However, after subsequent bites a bitter aftertaste built up that was ultimately unappealing. Even in the 50-50 mixture, the bitterness was too much. The shorter-cooked non-browned beets were not only less bitter, but they also retained some pleasing fresh beet flavor that was lost in the browned beets.

I wondered if the browned bitterness was from the baking soda, so I added some lemon juice to try to neutralize it. The lemon juice was a nice addition, but the bitterness persisted.

It’s possible that I somehow overdid the browning, but the lightly cooked beets were so good that I think I will stick with light cooking in the future.