Goat’s cheese and beetroot croquette in a crust of black bread

In 2025, Café Crepp was one of the 22 restaurants that hosted the food festival Maitsev Tartu. The festival’s idea is to give restaurants a boost during the winter period and develop and introduce local food culture and new food concepts, flavors, and local ingredients.
In this and the next two posts, I would like to share the recipes tasted at Café Crepp during this food festival from February 1 to 28, 2025.
If you want, you can also make these dishes at home. I tried to write the recipes in such a way that they could be made at home. There is a lot of preparation for each dish, but the result should be the same as what you could taste at the Maitsev Tartu meals at Café.

Authors of the photos used: Silver Gutmann, Joosep Sepp and Andres Tover.
Plating design: Joosep Sepp.

Preparation time: Preparation one day in advance, assembly of the food about 15-20 minutes.
Level: Not too complicated
Quantity: 5-6 servings

Goat cheese ball
Ingredients:
About 500 g potatoes
3 tbsp coarsely peeled beetroot
Sea salt to taste
0.25 tsp black pepper
0.25 tsp garlic powder
120-140 g goat cheese. Do not use mold cheese variant or very liquid spreadable cheese
Black bread breading
2-3 eggs for breading the balls
100 g boiled beetroot

Preparation:

1. To make the black bread breading, cut about half a loaf of bread into pieces about 1 to 1.5 cm in size and let it dry. You can dry the bread at room temperature or in an oven at low temperature, or use a special food dehydrator.
2. When the bread is completely dry, finely crush the bread using a food processor or meat grinder. Since the bread is very hard, you can only crush moderate amounts with a food processor. A meat grinder is ideal for making breadcrumbs.
3. Peel the potatoes and boil them in water seasoned with sea salt until the potatoes are very soft.
4. Press the potatoes through a potato masher into a puree.
5. Grate the cooked beetroot on a coarse grater and mix into the mashed potatoes. Season with sea salt, black pepper and garlic powder. Mix until smooth.
6. Cut the goat cheese into 20g portions and form small balls between your hands.
7. Take a small handful of the potato-beetroot mixture and press it into a flat disk in your palm, wrap it evenly around the goat cheese ball. Make all the balls in this way. The total weight of the ball should be about 90 grams.
8. Beat the eggs, add about 30-40 ml of water to the eggs and mix until smooth.
9. Roll the balls first in the egg and then in the breadcrumbs. Cover the ball very evenly with a layer of breadcrumbs.
10. Place the finished balls in the freezer and let them set for a few hours to overnight or freeze.
11. Bread the balls a second time. This is definitely necessary, because such large balls will most likely fall apart when fried.
12. To bread them, roll the balls again in the beaten egg and breadcrumbs. Freeze and store the balls in the freezer for as long as needed.

Beetroot mousse
Ingredients:
500 g cooked beetroot
100 ml whipping cream
50 g grated parmesan
Sea salt
0.25 tsp black pepper

Preparation:

1. Mash the cooked beetroot with the whipping cream until very smooth using a hand blender. Add less whipping cream at first, you can add it later, but it is difficult to boil out the excess liquid.
2. Heat the crushed beetroot mixture until boiling, add the parmesan and mix it. Season with salt and black pepper. Leave to stand and cool.
3. Before serving, blend the beetroot cream again with a hand blender until smooth. Test the presentation of the beetroot cream, place some of the beetroot cream on a plate. It should not squeeze out a lot of water from the plate. The beetroot cream should be about the thickness of sour cream so that it still holds its shape and does not immediately fall apart.

Lime-herb mayonnaise
Ingredients:
A large handful of dill
A large handful of parsley
200 ml cooking oil, rapeseed oil is ideal
1 egg yolk
0.5 tsp Dijon mustard
A pinch of finely ground black pepper
Sea salt to taste
Juice of one lime

Preparation

1. Coarsely chop the dill and parsley, place in a bowl, pour over with neutral-flavored cooking oil. Blend the herbs in a blender until fine and leave overnight to allow the flavors to blend
2. The next day, strain the crushed herbs from the oil using a fine sieve and use the resulting oil to make mayonnaise.
3. Mix together the egg yolk, mustard, lime juice, black pepper and a little salt. Start mixing. Add the oil little by little, stirring the mixture constantly. Do not pour the oil quickly, otherwise the mayonnaise will not become thick. If the mayonnaise is already starting to thicken, you can pour the oil more quickly. Add the oil until the mayonnaise is thick enough and holds its shape.

Plating
Ingredients:
Goat cheese ball
Beetroot mousse
Lime herb mayonnaise
Red beetroot leaves
Sprig of thyme for garnish
Cooking oil for frying goat cheese balls

Preparation:

1. Heat cooking oil in a heavy-bottomed pot or deep fryer to 160 degrees C, carefully place the frozen goat cheese ball in the cooking oil and fry for 10 minutes.
2. Place the goat cheese ball on a baking tray and place it in the oven at 100 degrees C for about 3-5 minutes. In the oven, the ball will become even crispier and the inside of the ball melts completely and warms up.
3. To serve the food, choose a plate of your choice, add two tablespoons of beetroot mousse, draw a comma-shaped shape with a spoon. Arrange the beetroot leaves neatly at the wider end of the shape and place a warmed goat cheese ball next to the leaves.
4. Put the mayonnaise in a piping bag and place three increasingly large dots of mayonnaise next to the beetroot mousse and one dot on top of the ball. Don’t skimp on the mayonnaise, the feedback from customers in the café was that there could always be more mayonnaise.
5. Place a small sprig of thyme on top of the dot of mayonnaise on the ball.
   Ready!!

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