My Favorite New Way to Roast Beets ♥

A new way to roast beets, in a moist, vinegar-y environment, turning out roasted beets that are just slightly pickled. Low Carb. Weight Watchers Freestyle Friendly. Not just vegan, Vegan Done Real. Naturally Gluten Free. Whole30 Friendly.

Oh people, it's almost here! No ... not summer, not vacation. Beet season. And more specifically beet salad season.

Apparently I'm #NotAlone because beet salads pop up on restaurant menus #AllTheTime. (Sorry, let's hope that a good beet salad will cure a bad case of #HashTagFever ...) What's astounding to this connoisseur of beet salads is the chefs' creativity: no two beet salads are alike. What unites all those creative salads is the main ingredient: the beets. And isn't it interesting that the beets themselves are much the same?!

No more. Enter Olio, my favorite restaurant here in St. Louis.

Funny story about Olio's owner, Ben Poremba. I first wrote about him for my column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2013. A couple of years later, my husband and a new client interspersed legal talk with food talk. "You should see my son-in-law," the client raved. "He opens the fridge and a half hour later we sit down to a feast." The client's son-in-law? Ben! Small town, this St. Louis.

Anyway. Ben's great. And Olio's my kinda place.

But when I wrote about Olio's Beet Salad last summer, I was so struck how the beets were roasted, yes, but also just very slightly pickle-y ... not as pickle-y as Refrigerator Pickled Beets, say, just a tiny tickle of pickle.

And that's when My Favorite Way to Roast Beets first faced competition. Will that long-time favorite beet-roasting technique survive? You bet. But every so often, it's great to have roasted beets with just a touch of vinegary sharpness ... and then, Beet People, you pull out this recipe.

This recipe is so quick and easy that I'm adding it to a growing collection of easy summer recipes published all summer long ever since 2009 at Kitchen Parade, my food column. With a free Kitchen Parade e-mail subscription, you'll never miss a one!

RECIPE for MY FAVORITE NEW WAY TO ROAST BEETS

Hands-on time: 5 minutes
Time to table: 2 hours

3 pounds raw beets, roughly equal and small-ish size
1/2 cup apple cider vinegar
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup olive oil
Salt and pepper
Sprigs of rosemary and thyme

Heat oven to 375F/190C.

Trim off most of the stems off the beets, down to an inch, leaving more if you're a beet nerd like me and revel in the color of beet stems. Leave the tail intact. Gently scrub the skins, take care to not break the skins.

Pour the vinegar, water and oil to an oven-safe baking dish. Add the beets in a single layer, leaving space between the beets. Sprinkle the beets with salt and pepper, then nestle in the rosemary and thyme.

Cut a piece of parchment to fit just inside the baking dish and place it on top of the beets, then cover the entire baking dish with foil. Roast the beets until a knife easily inserts into the center of a beet, about 90 minutes, longer for larger beets, shorter for smaller beets.

Let cool and remove the beets from the baking dish, cover and refrigerate for up to several days.

Now the fun part! Make a beet salad! Looking for ideas? Start here, there's a whole collection in with my beet recipes.

NUTRITION INFORMATION Per 1/4 pound (113 grams) beets: 49 Calories; 0g Tot Fat; 0g Sat Fat; 11g Carb; 3g Fiber; NetCarb8; 8g Sugar; 88mg Sodium; 0mg Cholesterol; 2g Protein. WEIGHT WATCHERS Old Points 0 & PointsPlus 0 & SmartPoints 2 & Freestyle 0

TODAY'S VEGETABLE RECIPE INSPIRATION Adapted from Olio's Beet Salad.

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MORE FAVORITE BEET RECIPES

~ My Favorite Way to Roast Beets ~
(photo tutorial with tips & tricks)

~ How to Make a Roasted Beet Salad ~
~ Beet Salad with Sumac, Yogurt & Pita ~
~ Twice-Roasted Beets with Red Grapes, Cherries, Blueberries & Avocado Feta Cream ~
~ Beet Pesto ~
~ more beet recipes ~
from A Veggie Venture

~ Borscht Beets with Sour Cream ~
~ Those Pink Potatoes ~
~ Refrigerator Pickled Beets ~
~ Karelian Borscht (Finnish - Russian Beet Borscht Soup) ~
~ more beet recipes ~
from Kitchen Parade, my food column

SEASONAL EATING: THIS SAME WEEK ACROSS THE YEARS

Green Beans with Jalapeño Lime Butter French Green Beans with Lemon-Garlic Sauce Fiddlehead Ferns Gorgeous Raw Asparagus Salad Celeriac Rémoulade Girlie Radish Salad Asparagus Omelet with Rémoulade Sauce One-Pot Pasta with Greens, Olives & Feta Easy Spinach Nests Avocado Dip Clean-Out-the-Veggie-Drawer Soup with a Don't-Throw-It-Away Secret Ingredient Rhubarb Curd Rhubarb Recipes (<-- mother lode of rhubarb) Quick Pickled Asparagus Rhubarb Pudding Cake

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