Recipes often call for simmering, boiling, or steaming beets to ready them for some later preparation. Don't you believe them. Anything but roasting is a waste of good beets.
If you can, choose beets with leaves still on them. The leaves are easier to read than the roots. A beet with strong, upright, roughy-toughy leaves is going to be a good beet. A beet with pale, limp, slimy leaves will break your heart; pass on by.
Immediately upon arriving home from the store, release your beets from the tight little girdle holding them together. It constricts the stems and makes them wither faster than they will untrammeled.
Preheat your oven to 350°.
Start in on the beets by cutting the leaves off about an inch above the top of the beet. (Save the greens and cook them as a separate vegetable.)
Almost all beets need to be scrubbed; they have, after all, been growing underground. Dunk them in a sink of lukewarm water and scrub them with a toothbrush. You want the sides and the bottom scrubbed thoroughly. The tops are going to get cut off after a while, so they don't need to be immaculate, but you don't want them raining dirt down all over everything.
Root hairs, those thin thready filaments that grow on the sides of the beets, are no problem for eating. If you find them unsightly, you can cut them off with a fingernail scissors or rub them off with a pot-scraper.
Now oil the sides and the bottoms of the beets. I use olive oil when I'm planning to use the beets in a Mediterranean or Middle Eastern meal, peanut oil for Asia and the Subcontinent, and a neutral oil like canola for everything else.
I like to put the oil in the bottom of a bowl and turn the beets every whichway till they're oiled. Oil spray works fine too.
Now put the beets on an oven-going pan (I always put mine on foil to make cleanup easier) and pop the pan in the oven.
Use a sharp knife to check the beets after 30 minutes. A beet is done when the knife goes in easily and smoothly to the very center. Remove any beets that are done and return the others to the oven. Size is the chief factor in the timing, but occasionally two beets that look to be the same size and shape take different amounts of time to cook. I have always wondered why.
The fully cooked beets will be very dark, almost black.
If you're dressing the beets you'd like them to be hot, so they'll soak up the dressing, but working with them right out of the oven is vexing. Better to let them cool off, trim them, and then warm them up again in the oven or the microwave.
When they're cool enough to handle comfortably, you need a sharp fork, a sharp knife, and a deep bowl. (I reuse the bowl I used for oiling them.) Don't use your best kitchen knife for this job because the blade will inevitably hit the sides of the bowl, and cutting against ceramic is no way to treat a good blade. I keep an old carbon-steel paring knife on hand for just such tasks.
Put a beet in the bottom of the bowl, use the sharp fork to anchor it, and cut off the top and the rat-tail.
Why put it in the bowl and handle it with the fork instead of cutting it on the table?
