Roasted Beets with Horseradish Cream

*Post by Angela.

While it's clear that I am normally a fan of tricksy/time-consuming food preparation, sometimes the most stunning dishes are simple ones that let the ingredients shine. For dinner with our vegetarian friends the other night, we decided to make the goat cheese gnocchi that turned out so well last time, but I wanted to pair it with something undemanding but impressive. After some consultation, Mark and I went with this beautiful recipe from my Paley’s Place cookbook for roasted beets with horseradish cream.

List of ingredients for the beets:

• 3 lbs beets
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• ½ cup sour cream
• ¼ cup prepared horseradish, slightly drained
• Juice of ½ lemon
• Kosher salt
• Fresh ground black pepper
• Leaves of 1 bunch Italian (flat-leaf) parsley
• 5 large cloves garlic

First, I preheated the oven to 400 degrees. I trimmed and scrubbed my beets, placed them in a roasting pan, drizzled them with olive oil (making sure each of the beets was thoroughly coated), covered them with foil and stuck them in the oven to bake for about 2 hours. I know it’s a lot of time to wait, but a long roasting time like this really concentrates the sweetness of the beets.

 

While waiting for the beets to cook, I mixed together the sour cream, horseradish, lemon juice, salt and pepper until well-combined.

I also threw the parsley leaves in a food processor with the garlic cloves and pulsed until well-combined. The simple combination of parsley and garlic is called persillade, and it is a fantastic French garnish. The raw garlic really gives a great bite to this dish, but if you’re not a fan, you could leave it out, I suppose.

 

After two hours, I took the pan out of the oven, let the beets cool about 5 minutes, then rubbed the skin off of them and cubed them up.

My guests each got their serving of beets drizzled with the horseradish cream and topped with a sprinkle of persillade. Though super easy to prepare, the strong and delicious flavors (the sweet earthiness of the beets, the bright and kicky creaminess from the horseradish cream and the bite and bitterness of the persillade) worked together as perfectly as the gorgeous colors in the dish. The gnocchi (which takes FOREVER to make) went over well, but the beets? Stole the show.