Wondering what to do with beet juice? This guide covers how to pick it, cook it, store it, and swap it, plus 11 recipes to put it to work.

What is beet juice?

Beet juice is the deep ruby liquid pressed from raw or cooked beets, and it carries two things at once: an intense natural color and a clean, earthy sweetness. Cooks reach for it as much for the brilliant magenta it lends as for the flavor.

That color comes from betalain pigments, the same compounds that stain a cutting board the moment you slice into a raw beet. A spoonful tints a whole bowl of batter or frosting a vivid pink with no artificial dye needed.

You can buy it bottled or juice it fresh, and the simplest source of all is the liquid left from canned or boiled beets. Fresh tastes brightest and most vivid.

Ways to Use Beet Juice

Its headline job is natural color. A few tablespoons turn cake batter or frosting a striking pink to red, which is the trick behind a dye-free red velvet and the swirl in Homemade Marble Bread and Homemade Two-Tone Beetroot Bread.

It is also the backbone of borscht. The juice gives that famous beet soup its glowing color and earthy base, as in Refreshing Beet Borscht, and a splash stirred in at the end revives color lost during long cooking.

Pickling is the other classic use. The juice dyes Pickled Eggs and Ben's Pickled Eggs a deep pink shell, and the same liquid colors pickled vegetables and Harvard Beets.

For drinks, raw beet juice goes into vegetable blends like Vegetable Juice Cocktail and into smoothies, where its earthy sweetness rounds out sharper flavors. A little goes a long way.

Cooking Tips and Common Mistakes

Add the juice late when you want maximum color. Betalains are heat-sensitive and fade with prolonged cooking, so a final splash near the end of simmering keeps a soup or sauce vivid rather than dull brown.

A touch of acid helps hold the color. A squeeze of lemon or a splash of vinegar stabilizes the pigment, which is one reason borscht and pickling brines so often include it.

The unavoidable warning is staining. Beet juice stains hands, boards, and clothing fast, so wear an apron and wipe spills before the juice dries. The pink tint on your fingers is harmless and washes off in a day.

One more thing worth knowing: beets can turn urine or stool pink, a harmless effect called beeturia.

It alarms people who do not expect it, but it is simply the pigment passing through.

Substitutes

Beet powder is the most direct swap and the handiest pantry version. It is dehydrated beet ground fine, so reconstitute it with a little water or add it dry to dry ingredients; start with a teaspoon and build up, since it is far more concentrated than the juice.

Pomegranate juice gives a reddish tint with more tartness, useful in drinks though weaker as a dye. For pure color in baking without beet flavor, a few drops of natural red food coloring stand in, though you lose the earthy note.

In a soup, simply grating or pureeing whole cooked beets delivers both the color and the body the juice would have added.

Buying and Storing

Bottled beet juice lives near the other vegetable juices or in the health-food aisle; look for one with no added sugar if you want the pure ingredient. Beet powder keeps for many months in the baking or supplement section.

Fresh juice is the most perishable. Refrigerate it in a sealed jar and use it within two to three days, since it loses both color and flavor quickly once pressed. Give it a shake before pouring, as it separates.

To keep it longer, freeze the juice in an ice cube tray, then bag the cubes. A single cube is a pre-measured shot of color for a batch of frosting or a pot of soup, and it thaws in minutes.

Quick facts

In Chinese

甜菜汁

British (UK) term

Beet juice

en français

jus de betterave

en español

jugo de remolacha

Recipes using beet juice

There are 11 recipes that contain this ingredient.

All 11 recipes