How to Roast Beets and Easily Freeze Them For Later (Picture Tutorial)
Yes, you CAN freeze beets! With this easy step-by-step tutorial learn how to roast beets and then freeze them to preserve for the year. After thawing they taste just like you cooked them fresh! Roasted, frozen beets are perfect for salads, sides, and other recipes – and may just win over non beet lovers, too.
✩ What readers are saying…
“This recipe worked perfectly! When I took them out of the freezer for use, it was like I had just cooked them. Thank you! ” -Suzy
Have you noticed that beets can be a pretty divisive vegetable? It seems you either like them or you think they “taste like dirt.”
Personally, I don’t get it. I mean, cooked correctly beets can be as sweet as carrots – which are also grown in the dirt and most people seem to like.
But I’m the lone beet fan in my family. The kids won’t touch them and Brian merely puts up with them. Which means I don’t serve them very often and I don’t grow a ton of them in our garden, just a couple of rows for me.
But you know what happens with even a few rows, right?
Most of the beets are all ready to be harvested at once. I had the problem of too many beets for just me – but then none for the future. Which made me wonder if beets could be frozen.
Can beets be frozen successfully?
Pickling seems to be the most popular way to preserve beets, but my few small rows never made enough to pickle (update: not since I discovered this easy way to pickle jar-by-jar!), so I decided to try freezing some that I had oven roasted–even though I had never heard or read of it being done.
Seems like I’m a rebel like that – see my non-blanched frozen green beans, corn freezing experiments, and best ways to freeze basil tests.
I roasted them in the oven, in their skins to preserve moisture, then chopped and added them to freezer baggies in small portions.
The Results – Tested on Guests
Surprisingly, the beets tasted just as good after a couple months in the freezer as they did the day I roasted them!
So I made my favorite salad with them, Roasted Beet Salad with Goat Cheese, and served it to company.
Um, didn’t I just say beets are divisive…and I served a salad with beets to company?
In my defense, I thought I was safe because our company was a gardener, and don’t most gardeners grow beets? Well, not the one sitting at my table.
He promptly said, “Beets are the one vegetable I don’t eat” and proceeded to give me the dirt comparison. Great – of all the vegetables on the planet I pick the one he didn’t eat.
Of course I said he didn’t have to eat them, but he decided to try them anyway. The verdict?
“These are the best beets I’ve ever eaten. They don’t taste like beets!”
Now I make sure to grow enough rows to be able to freeze beets in small packages to last me through the winter (as well as now pickling a few jars of these easy, honey sweetened beets).
Though I only serve them to people I know will enjoy them – I don’t want to waste them!
How to Prepare, Oven Roast and Freeze Beets
Here is a step-by-step tutorial to prepare, cook, and freeze beets because I didn’t know how to prepare them when I first started growing beets and I’m pretty sure there are some people out there who may be as clueless as I was.
Of course, this is just one method for cooking beets (like cooking beets in a slow cooker or Instant Pot!), but most of these steps are the same no matter how you decide cook them.
Step 1: Wash and trim. Wash beets thoroughly with a vegetable brush in order to get all the dirt off. Trim the greens off, leaving about an inch of the tops. Trim the roots as well, if needed.
Step 2: Prepare for baking. Place the beets in a shallow baking dish and pour in about 1/4 cup of water.
Note: I suppose this isn’t true “roasting” like when we toss vegetables with olive oil (which you can do with beets, by the way… they get nice crispy edges which is great for that application, but not what I want on a salad…), but it’s like roasting meat, I guess. We don’t want the beets to dry out too much or they won’t freeze as well.
Step 3: Bake. Cover well with foil and bake at 400 degrees for up to an hour, depending on the size of the beets.
Step 4: Test and let cool. Check doneness by inserting a small knife into the thickest parts of the beets. Let cool until you can comfortably handle them.
Jami’s Tip
The beets pictured were fairly large so I cut them in half to speed the cooking time (small to medium beets can be left whole). They were done in about 45 minutes.
Step 5: Peel. Cut the rest of the tops and bottoms off and skin the beets by pulling with a small knife.
TIP: Some directions say to put gloves on and “rub the skins off” but that hasn’t worked well for me, but you do what works for you. And I don’t wear gloves- I just wash my hands afterwards and don’t have a problem with staining.
You can use the beets any way you’d like now – serve right away with butter or on a salad.
Or read on to see how to easily freeze cooked beets:
Cut beets. Cut the cooked beets into any shape you’d like – I typically cube the beets into bite-size pieces. You can also, slice, julienne or cut into wedges.
Freeze. Place the cut beets in a freezer bagging or container, label, and freeze.
Big TIP: I remove the air from my freezer baggies with a straw and it keeps most of the frost out of the packages. (And no, I don’t need a food saver – this has always worked great and is less expensive, lol!)
Storage
Try to use the frozen beets within 6-9 months for best flavor and texture.
One time, though, a few baggies got shoved in the back of my freezer and I found them a year later. I served them anyway and was shocked that they were still pretty tasty, even after a year.
However, a baggie I found after 1-1/2 years didn’t fare as well and the beets were shriveled and soggy.
(Of course this was before I had the chalkboard freezer organizer which helps me keep better track of what we have for planning menus and using up food.)
Freezing Beets FAQs
I simply defrost in the fridge or in warm water – it doesn’t take much. And then use cold in salads or gently warm as you’d like (similar to refrigerated cooked beets you can buy in the stores).
Yes, but they will not be as convenient as already cooked. Cut the raw peeled beets into small dices, transfer them into a freezer bag, label and freeze. Any beet variety can be frozen like this.
If you’d like grated beets, you can freeze them raw – grate and lay out on a cookie sheet to flash freeze before transferring to freezer containers.
Yes, if the beets are peeled and cut into smaller pieces first (or grated like above).
It depends on how you want to use them – grated raw or diced beets are good for using raw in salads or adding to soups. Roasted beets can be used to top salads or heated as a side dish with butter that only has to be thawed and warmed.
Beets store in the freezer about 6-12 months.
More Vegetables You Can Easily Freeze
- How to Freeze Green Beans without Blanching
- How to Freeze Snap Peas Without Blanching
- Three Ways to Freeze Corn
- How to Freeze Broccoli – Blanched & Unblanched
I hope you love how these beets turn out – if you do this, be sure to leave a recipe rating so I (and others) know how you liked it!
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How to Roast Beets and Easily Freeze Them For Later
Ingredients
- 8 medium to large beets*
- ¼ cup water
Instructions
- To Roast: Wash the beets thoroughly and trim the roots and greens off, leaving about an inch of the tops. For even cooking, cut any large beets in half.
- Place the beets in a shallow 13×9-inch baking dish and pour in about 1/4 cup of water.
- Cover well with foil and bake in a 400 degree oven for 45 minutes to an hour, depending on the size of the beets. To check if they’re done, insert a small knife into the thickest parts of the beets. (If there are smaller beets cooking with larger ones, remove the beets as they finish cooking.)
- Cut the rest of the tops and bottoms off and skin the beets by pulling it off with a small knife.
- Cut the beets into chunks or slices and serve right away or freeze for later.
- To freeze for later: Place the beets in a baggie or other freezer container, removing as much air as possible, label and put in the freezer. Use within 6-9 months for best quality, or up to a year.
Notes
Nutrition
This article has been updated – it was originally published in June of 2010 and updated in 2022.
Thanks for the freezing info. This is my first year growing beets and have a bumper crop. I was always indifferent about them until adding to some roasted root veggies for Thanksgiving last year. I’ve been roasting them dry for salads or snacking. Just clean and toss in the oven. No dripping and no pan to clean up. The ice-water dunk does help with skinning too.
Really, Ken? You put the whole beets (with skins on) right on the oven rack like baking potatoes? I’ve never heard of beets cooked like that – I’m going to have to try it! Thanks for sharing that 🙂
thanks for info on freezing beets. I cook them all the time but did not think about freezing them. Whats with us beet people… talk about passion!
Yeah – I just can’t understand why people don’t like them, I mean, they make sugar out of them for goodness sake. 🙂
In my experience most people who “don’t like beets” have only had two kinds of beets: unimproved commercially-canned (I have bad memories of lukewarm, watery canned beets sloshing around on a school lunch tray) or overgrown, too-long-stored, woody, bitter beets. I had a relative who considered it a “waste” if you picked a beet when it was smaller than a softball and often let them get much larger – while in my opinion they taste the sweetest and have the best texture when they’re closer to a golfball (the tiny beets from thinning the row are wonderful!) and definitely no larger than a tennis ball, and for me that’s the only time the greens are at all palatable since they get bitter as they get older and larger. I just can’t get next to bitter greens no matter how much cream sauce or vinegar you put on them. I like to use golden beets – the smaller the better – for serving to people who are not beet enthuiasts since they have much less earthiness, and there’s no red color to trigger the “aack! beets!” response. I like my little roasted beets cooled to room temperature, with the crumbled goat cheese and chopped walnuts but a balsamic/shallot/walnut-oil dressing – it’s especially pretty with the stripey beets. If you have access to a deep fryer, beet chips are pretty darn awesome; I have not been happy with baked ones though. I line my roasting pan with foil or parchment since if the pan cooks dry that caramelized beet juice can be a stinker to clean off. (On the other hand, I have had many people ask me “how can you not like eggplant/artichokes/kale” – kale is the big one lately, it’s very uncool to not like kale! – with complete shock because it’s _their_ favorite veggie. So I try not to be too unsympathetic to the non-fans… besides, it means more for me.)
A tiny little nitpick, though: sugar beets and garden/table beets are only distant cousins now. I have eaten sugar beets (which look like parsnips on steroids) twice, out of curiosity/challenge, and they actually taste pretty nasty, sweet yes but also throatpuckeringly bitter! Garden beets, conversely, have been bred for flavor and nutrients rather than pure sugar content and are only about 3% sugar vs. sugar beets’ 20%; I have read recipes for making a sweet syrup from juiced/ground garden beets on one of those survivalist/”prepper” websites, but reportedly it tasted very strongly of beets and the process of neutralizing that was very involved.
Thanks for the tip- I’m glad to know I can freeze roasted beets. Here’s a tip for you- drop the roasted beets into a bowl of ice cold water immediately after roasting them, you can then slip the skin off with no problem. Place the bowl in the sink and have a clean bowl handy to drop the beets into.
Awesome tip – thank you! I’ll try that the next time I’m roasting.