The Doctor's Journey

Juicy Beet Balls

• By admin
• February 9, 2014
• No Comments

Everyone from Dr. Oz to the nutrition nerds at my local Whole Foods seem obligated in telling me how I should be drinking beet juice.  Even my patients (who enjoy torturing me by starting off our visits saying, “Dr. Oz’s says…blah, blah, blah”) are encouraging me to get with the program about beet juice.  So what am I missing?  What’s making this stuff the magical ruby red elixir of life?  And most important to you, how can the nimble doctor spin this into another one of his crazy adventures?

For those of you who avoid the produce section of your local supermarket, beets are a root vegetable that sort of look like a cross between a small potato and an onion.  On the inside, beets have a dark purple-red color that will stain anything that it comes in contact with.  Since I don’t watch much of Dr. Oz , I had to do my own research beet juice by flipping through old issues of Bicycling Magazine and Wikipedia to find out about the rest.  It appears that beets are chalk full of goodies called nitrates.  Our bodies take nitrates and then convert them into nitric oxide, which do several cool things related to blood flow, muscle contractions, and nerve communication.  I actually learned about these things in medical school, but I usually don’t get too many chances to drop this knowledge in general conversations.  Additional confirmed benefits from beet juice include improved exercise endurance and blood pressure lowering.  This is good stuff indeed!

High Dollar Beet Juice Options

So my next step was to satisfy my beet juice fix.  After all, who doesn’t want lower blood pressure and a legal way to improve their athletic performance next race.  I headed over to Whole Foods where my friendly dreadlocked granola-crunching associate pointed the way to the beet juice stash.  Holy guacamole!  A bottle of the stuff was running 8 bucks.  A fresh version that wasn’t pure beet juice, but mixed with apple and carrot juice was a relative bargain at $5.75.  I was starting to think that prescription medication would be a cheaper way to lower my blood pressure, but then realized it wouldn’t do much for my endurance at my next triathlon.   It was then that the nimble doctor got his next bright idea; make the stuff myself.  First step, get the heck out of Whole Foods and buy some beets at a non-luxury grocery store!  I’ve heard it mentioned that beets taste “earthy”, which is another way of saying like dirt.  I decided to go for a juice blend with apples, carrots and a little bit of ginger.  I won’t bore you with all the recipe facts, mostly because I don’t remember them and because there was a lot of trial and error going on in the nimble doctor’s test kitchen.  I pretty much peeled everything, cut it up and threw it in my favorite kitchen appliance, the Vitamix.

Vitamix Power!

Will anyone else admit to being talked into buying one of these things at the state fair?  Maybe it’s just an Oklahoma thing, but glad I did, because now I can make beet juice.  The chopped fruits and veggies were no match for the powerful Vitamix, and pretty soon I had a lot of pulp.  My beet juice cocktail would have to wait for the pulp mix to drain through a strainer and fill a fancy martini glass, which it did twenty painfully slow minutes later.  The results looked pretty good.  The taste, well let’s just say that it hard to change the taste of dirt.  To my credit though, it didn’t taste all that different than the liquid gold I picked up at Whole Foods.

Okay, so what I’ve just provided you is the Racheal Ray version of my juicing adventure; it was clean, pretty and done in 30 minutes.  The truth was that I made a total mess of my kitchen.  There was beet juice everywhere and you could have easily mistaken part of my home for a Texas Chainsaw Massacre sequel.  Needless to say Mrs. nimble doctor was not too happy, so I needed to figure out something quick.  Bright idea #2…Beet Balls!  Stick with me on this one.  I had so much pulp left after only squeezing out a couple of shots of beet juice from my previous effort.  I nimble “doctored” the above picture by adding apple juice and water to make things look good.  I did say the above was the Rachael Ray version where everything turns out perfect.  Okay, so back to making my wife happy…or at least less mad.  You see, all that left over pulp is a dead ringer for red velvet cake batter.  So I look up to see what I need to make it and turns out that I have most of the stuff, with some medications of course.  A couple of eggs, some almond flower, a banana, chia seeds…okay, a lot of modification, but it was looking very promising.  I roll the mix into a several balls and bake for 40 minutes at 350.

 As things baked I cleaned the kitchen, which is obviously step 1 in making Mrs. nimble doctor happy and waited patiently for my experiment to evolve.   After 40 minutes and 15 minutes of cooling at room temperature I had beet ball success, visually at least.  Then came the moment of truth, sharing my creation with Mrs. nimble doctor.  Her first impression was not so promising.

“What are these things, Barney turds?”

It wasn’t the red velvet cake balls I was hoping for, but I think the chia seeds screwed up that part. Next came her reluctant taste test, and as I held my breath she uttered the two words that sealed my fate for that night….”Not bad.” Yes, vindication!  She likes my beet balls!  And this whole beet juice ordeal that started 5 hours ago was finally over.  So there you have it.  Beet juice has some interesting health and athletic performance benefits, but it can be messy to make on your own. Buying a beet juice blend might be the way to go, but keep in mind it’s not exactly cheap and it’s an acquired taste.

“Barney Turds”

Update.  Since the first draft of this post, Mrs. Nimble doctor has asked me to make those Barney turds again.  So what started out at a juicing story, is now a successful desert story in our household.  I also forgot to mention, that consuming beets and beets juice may result in a harmless reddish appearance to your urine and stools as it is excreted from the body.  So don’t say that I didn’t warn you.

Thanks for following along and until next time.   Please don’t forget to check out my donation page and remember what this journey is all about.

I actually have detailed recipes for both the Beet Juice Cocktail and the Beet Ball/BarneyTurds featured in this post.  Contact me below if you would like me to share those with you.

This article is not meant to serve as a source of medical advice.  Please contact your family physician before starting any supplements or nutritional products that may affect any known or undiagnosed medical conditions.