Easy Beet Relish

Beet relish is the tangy condiment you need to have on hand. Use it to top anything from burgers, hot dogs, or sandwiches, or add it to a cheese plate.

Condiments are essentials in my house. We often whip up burgers or hot dogs on the weekends, especially when the weather is nice, and I like to have a variety of toppings to choose from. Ketchup and mustard aren’t enough to cut it.

Versatile Beets

I often feel that beets are underused for some reason. I love them so much. If I have cooked beets in the fridge, I often pull out the container and just snack on them. They’re really meaty in texture and have so much natural sweetness.

I wonder if the reason beets aren’t as popular as some other vegetables is because people don’t know what to do with them. Well, this should help. We’ve got them in a relish below, with all kinds of ways to cook them and use them pointed out along the way.

Before we move on, if you’re here thinking about how you need to eat beets more often, I want to remind you that beet leaves and stems are edible, and actually so delicious. Truly, beet greens are my favorite cooked vegetable. When the bunches of beets at my grocery store have big luscious leaves and undamaged scarlet stems, I buy those beets immediately. I will probably end up roasting the beets themselves a day or two later, but when I get home, it’s the leaves I’ll be feasting on, and here’s how I cook them.

Cooked or Raw Beets

I’ve been asked this question many times so I thought I should put it here. Can you eat raw beets. The answer is yes, beets are perfectly safe to eat raw. They’re just really dense so they’re difficult to chew through. For that reason, raw beets are usually either finely chopped or finely sliced.

For the relish recipe, I wouldn’t try using raw beets. You want them to be sweeter, which they get from being cooked, and all nice and soft and creamy.

How to Cook Beets For Relish

The best way to cook beets for anything is to roast them like this. That’s just plain true. They end up really sweet and tender. The best thing about that method though is that they’re roasted with the skins on so it’s really easy to get them into the oven, with no mess involved. The peels come off easily after they cooked – they literally almost slip off!

If you want to boil the beets, you totally can. And like with the roasting technique above, you don’t have to peel them first. You can check out my pickled beets recipe over here, where I start the process off by simmering beets until they’re tender and then peel them once they’re cool. That’s exactly what you would do for the relish below as well.

The only downside to the roasting and the boiling methods is that they take awhile, up to an hour depending on the size of the beet. If you want to save time, you can instead cook the beets in the Instant Pot like this.

If you want an even quicker method, and this really is the quickest ever, you can use canned beets. Yes, really. I’m not one for canned foods generally, but years ago my mom told me that she’d tried making our family’s traditional borscht using canned beets, just on a whim, and it worked! I tried it out and was hooked. I now use canned beets in borscht all the time, like here. I use sliced canned beets on salads like this one too. And, of course I tried it to make beet relish, and it worked like a charm. So, if you want the quickest beet relish, go with the can. Oh, sometimes my grocery store sells cooked beets in the produce department. That would be another quick option that would definitely work.

Uses For Beet Relish

My favorite thing to use beet relish on is a burger. I think it goes really well with mild, melty cheese, like fontina for example. Beets go really well with goat cheese, so anytime you’re putting goat cheese on something, go in with the relish on the side. A turkey and goat cheese sandwich with arugula and beet relish sounds really amazing to me right now also.

Beet relish is also really great to add a bowl of it on a cheese plate. If you’re entertaining, guests can spread it on a cracker. It adds some interest and color to any cheese plate or charcuterie board. In England, I’ve had “beetroot” relish like this served on a Ploughman’s Lunch platter of Cheddar, bread, pickled onions.

The relish comes together really quickly, all you need are those beets, some onion, vinegar, sugar, salt, and cornstarch. That’s it! It cooks in less than 10 minutes, and you can store it in a glass jar with a lid.

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