The Absolute Best Way To Store Beets

Love them or hate them, beets can be a useful ingredient to have hanging around the kitchen. They are a versatile root vegetable known for their striking purpley-red centers. Roasted, dried, pickled, or grilled, they can be sneakily hidden into a dish or be a front-and-center showstopper.

Having a beet salad can be a refreshing meal in the summertime, paired with your green of choice, carrots, onions, and radishes, via Produce Made Simple, and topped with balsamic vinegar or lemon juice for added acidity.

Soup is another meal beets can enhance seamlessly. Borscht, a European stew, lets the beet flavor shine, but additions like dill and sour cream make the dish more complex. And the stew's beet-like color has made it a memorable favorite — with pasta learning to incorporate the rich red color into dishes by boiling and puréeing the veggie before kneading it into the dough, via Serious Eats, for a beautiful red color.

To be able to enjoy beets in these dishes, or on their own, they must be stored properly.

There are many advisable ways to store beets, as they can be saved for a relatively long time. If you aren't planning on using your beets in the near future, freezing or pickling your beets will preserve them for about a year, according to MasterClass.

However, if you want to incorporate fresh beets into your next dish, Farmer Lee Jones, of The Chef's Garden, has some advice: Speaking on the Rachael Ray Show, he says that he simply places an entire beet, with the dirt still on, in an air-tight plastic container. In the container, he will lay a damp paper towel over the vegetable to keep the moisture packed into the beet. He notes that beets are 90% water, so it's important to not have them dry out.

But, if your beets do get soft, he says it is easy to rehydrate them — so this should never be a reason you toss your beets out.