Top Eastern European Beet Recipes

This brilliantly colored dish can be served as a vegetable or salad, hot or cold.

This roasted beet salad can be made with a combination of red and gold beets, if you can find them. It's dressed with a simple vinaigrette and garnished with candied bacon. Eastern Europeans, particularly Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Czechs and Slovaks, are fond of both beets and bacon -- a match made in heaven!

Beets and the pickling technique are wildly popular with Eastern Europeans. Since this recipe isn't processed using the hot- or cold-pack method, it is meant to be eaten within a few weeks of making it.

This magenta-colored soup does double duty hot or cold. It warms the toes in winter and cools in summer.

This recipe for cold Lithuanian beet soup or šaltibarščiai is made with buttermilk, sour cream, hard-cooked eggs, cucumbers and dill. It's refreshing on a hot day. Compare this with Polish cold cucumber-beet soup recipe.

This soup, known as beet borscht in Russian, is another hot or cold dish. Add boiled potatoes when eating it hot for a heartier dish, or garnish with sour cream and julienned beets if enjoying it cold.

This recipe for mushrooms, beets and baby greens salad combines three ingredients Eastern Europeans love. The twist here is the truffle vinaigrette with walnuts. Truffles and truffle oils are increasingly being seen in high-end Eastern European restaurants and hotels, and in Poland where MoPO, or modern Polish cuisine, is taking hold.

Nothing slakes the thirst like cold buttermilk and that's what you'll find in this refreshing cold cucumber-beet soup, which can be eaten pureed until velvety smooth or left chunky.

Take advantage of the staggering variety of beets at your local farmers market and mix and match colors for a sensational-looking dish. If you use orange beets, cook them separately otherwise they'll turn purple.

The soup is made with a beet sour that must ferment for at least three days before using. The traditional way to eat barszcz wigilijny is with mushroom uszka.