Market Flavours: Balsamic Roasted Beets

I admit to loving beets – blended raw into a juice, pickled, or roasted – and I firmly maintain that if you think that you don’t like beets, you just haven’t found the right beet recipe. Beets are on in full force at the market these weeks, and I wrote previously about eating the greens sautéed with a bit of garlic and splashed with red wine vinegar, and this week I prepared the beets that came with those greens.

Simpler is better with most vegetables, dressed only with something to complement the natural flavours. For roasted beets, balsamic vinegar makes a wonderful addition to the natural earthy taste of the beets, and it tends to caramelize in the baking dish to make a wonderful sweet coating.

I scrubbed the beets but left on the tails and a bit of the tops, and put them in a baking dish, then chopped a few of the garlic scapes that I still have lingering in my fridge (amazingly, still as fresh as the day I brought them home) and threw them in. I sprinkled a bit of olive oil over it, then a generous dollop of balsamic vinegar. The dish, covered, went into a 375F oven until the beets were tender when pierced with a fork, about an hour.

Many recipes for roasted beets that I’ve seen advise to peel them at this point, but the young beets at the market right now don’t need peeling, the peel is so soft and thin. I just sliced the beets back into the dish so that the remains of the reduced balsamic could gently coat them; if you had tiny baby beets, you could just leave them whole. The result: the earthy flavour of the beets, the sweetness of the balsamic and the light garlic taste of the scapes combined to make an impressive dish that almost became our main course that night.

I roasted these in a covered dish in the oven, but you could also wrap them in foil packets and put on the BBQ with indirect heat for about the same amount of time.

You can buy beets from Bosco Farms, Godelie Farm and O.K. Farms at St. Andrew’s Farmers’ Market on Saturdays, 9am-1pm.