Once you train your eyes to seek out beets, you can't stop seeing them. They're everywhere, even in the potato chip aisle.
I have always championed Terra Chips, the innovative and colorful blend of root vegetables—including my beloved beets—so I was near-ecstatic to find this best-of-the-best pairing of beets and sweet potatoes given the potato-chip treatment.
The mission of the Bites Beet Beat has been to showcase summer's ruby-red diversity of beets, which I believe to be an undervalued and overlooked crop. So I applaud Terra Chips' bold gesture to showcase beets not as a starchy extra but as a leading veg.
Unfortunately, what we have in the Terra Chips Sweet & Beets pairing is the Peter Principle at play in the world of snack foods. Beets, as it turns out, do not deserve top billing in a bag of chips, for the simple reason that they taste too much like stale Frosted Flakes.
So, it is with a heavy heart that I reject Sweet & Beets. But it is with great confidence in beets and optimism for the future that I carry on in my pursuit of this great red root.
As always, if you know of any excellent beet recipes worthy of inclusion—beet cereal, perhaps?—please forward them to the Bites Beet Beat.
