Chef Martin Oswald was in his Austrian kitchen today toasting mustard seeds in a dry pan while I sat in our RV in Bend, Oregon, where we’ve parked for the summer because Las Vegas in June is not for the faint of heart. He was making a beet tartare and a high-nitrate summer salad, and at some point the conversation drifted from cooking into chemistry, which is what tends to happen when you put a chef and a doctor in the same room.
Every ingredient Martin picked for today’s session was loaded with inorganic nitrate. Beets, arugula, mâche, celery, radish, parsley, rhubarb. That wasn’t accidental. And the reason it matters has to do with what happens to that nitrate once you eat it.
The conversion pathway goes like this. You eat the food. Specific bacteria on your tongue reduce the nitrate into nitrite. That’s the first step, and it happens entirely in your mouth. When you swallow, the nitrite hits the acidic environment of your stomach, where some of it gets converted directly into nitric oxide. Whatever nitrite is left over enters your bloodstream and can be converted into nitric oxide later in your tissues, particularly in low-oxygen areas like working muscles.
Nitric oxide tells the smooth muscle in your blood vessel walls to relax. Your blood vessels open up, blood pressure comes down, and your tissues start getting better oxygen delivery. This is real physiology with real cardiovascular consequences.
It’s also why I wrote a piece a while back about antibacterial mouthwash. Those bacteria on your tongue that perform the first conversion? If you nuke them with mouthwash, you’ve cut the pathway off at the start. You can eat beets all day long and blunt the cardiovascular benefit because the bacteria weren’t there to begin the conversion.
Martin brought up the question about nitrate in bacon and sausage, which is something I hear constantly. People see “nitrate” on the package and assume they’re getting the same benefit as a beet salad. The molecule is technically identical. But what it’s packaged with changes the outcome completely.
In vegetables, nitrate comes packaged with vitamin C and polyphenols and a bunch of other antioxidants that steer the chemistry toward nitric oxide and block harmful byproducts from forming. In processed meat, you’ve got the opposite situation. Nitrite meets amino acids from the protein under high heat, and that combination can produce nitrosamines, which are carcinogenic. Heme iron from the meat accelerates the reaction, and there are no antioxidants in the mix to pump the brakes. Same molecule, very different ending.
So that’s the biology. The cooking was just as good.
Martin made two dishes. The first was a beet tartare, which is a plant-based take on what’s traditionally a raw meat preparation. He diced the beets small, then mixed in chopped cherries, toasted almonds, fresh-grated horseradish, and pickled rhubarb. The dressing was almond butter with pomegranate molasses, and he added black lentils to round out the protein and mellow the horseradish bite. The whole thing went into a ring mold and came out looking like something from a restaurant in Aspen, which is where Martin spent years cooking professionally.
The second dish was an everyday summer salad built on the same high-nitrate idea but much simpler to throw together. He started with arugula and mâche. If you haven’t tried mâche, it’s worth seeking out. It’s sweet enough to calm arugula’s peppery kick, and it’s also one of the highest nitrate greens you can buy. Martin calls it Vogerlsalat in Austrian German, though you’ll probably find it labeled as lamb’s lettuce at the store. He added celery and radish, plus a big handful of flat-leaf parsley, which he pointed out is wildly underrated as a nitrate source. Blackberries went in for sweetness and chopped hazelnuts for crunch. Then thick-cut red onions, which add a textural punch you wouldn’t get from fine dice.
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The dressing was toasted hazelnuts blended with mustard and a bit of miso for umami, then loosened with vinegar and enough water to get it creamy. Martin’s tip was to roast the hazelnuts low and slow, around 160 degrees for about 20 minutes, to develop that deep toasted flavor you recognize from Nutella.
What I appreciate about the way Martin cooks is that he’s always thinking about how flavors and textures work against each other. Beets are soft, so he pairs them with something that crunches. Arugula is spicy, so he brings in something sweet. He borrowed the thick-cut red onion idea from Greek salads, where those big rough chunks give you a burst of raw onion flavor that disappears just as fast as it arrived. Once you understand those principles, he says, you don’t really need the recipe anymore.
He also said something practical about sweeteners that I want to pass along. Rhubarb is extremely tart, and when you’re pickling it you need some sweetness. Martin’s not precious about it. Date syrup is great if you have it. But a small amount of brown sugar in the pickling liquid, when you’re eating the fruit and discarding the liquid, is not something to lose sleep over. Getting so rigid about a teaspoon of sweetener that you skip the rhubarb entirely would be a bad trade, given how much nitrate rhubarb contains.
One last thing, because I love telling this story. Research suggests that eating about one medium beet, or a two-ounce shot of beet juice, roughly two hours before exercise can improve endurance performance. The mechanism is exactly what we already covered. More nitric oxide, better blood flow, better oxygen to the muscles. My youngest son ran cross-country in high school, and we used to “dope” him with beets before meets. He turned out to be one of the 10 to 15 percent of people who get beeturia, meaning his urine and stool went bright red. If you’re not expecting it, that’s a memorable bathroom trip. But it’s completely harmless.
Summer is a good time to lean into these foods. The produce is at its best and most people are already reaching for lighter meals. Martin’s salad works as a full lunch, and the tartare is the kind of thing you bring to a dinner party when you want people to ask how you made it.
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