Healthy Roasted Golden Beets and Rosemary Potatoes Recipe

Stop. Forget everything you know about red beets.

Think instead about a rich and buttery, sweet, yellow-fleshed beet. Consider the sweet and delicious golden beet: one with bright-orange skin and deep-yellow flesh, one that won’t stain your fingers or your work surface, one that’s easy to work with raw or cooked.

That hard and rough-looking beet root will turn into something soft, rich, and even buttery once cooked. The golden beet can be peeled and sliced raw, which makes it excellent and easy for roasting. It takes about 45 minutes for the sliced beets to soften, which is why they’re the perfect accompaniment to roasted potatoes. The golden beet is super sweet, rich, and buttery. They’re high in sugar content, so kids love them!

I generally cook these with yukon gold or red potatoes. The yukon gold is my favorite. They too are buttery and sweet – the perfect accompaniment!

There are many health benefits to both raw and cooked beets. They contain compounds that help protect against heart disease, birth defects, and certain cancers. Beets provide antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and detoxification support.

Although they seem hardy, beets are surprisingly delicate. Keep beet roasting times to under an hour for maximum nutrition. Add beets to your diet twice a week for maximum health benefits.

I live in a very rural part of northern California. Even my local grocery store has both red and golden beets all year long. Farmer’s markets generally carry beets as well. The beet season usually runs June through October. They keep for long periods of time in dark storage or root cellars. Put them in a tightly sealed plastic bag inside a paper bag in your fridge, and they’ll keep for up to three weeks.