All Beets Explained in 15 Minutes

Red beet. Most people know this one. It's the deep, dark purple red vegetable that stains your hands and turns your cutting board into a crime scene. Red beets have been grown for thousands of years, originally along the coasts of North Africa and Europe. Ancient Romans ate them regularly, and in medieval times people used them as medicine for fevers and digestion problems. Today red beets are eaten roasted, boiled, pickled, or blended into smoothies. They're packed with something called nitrates, which help your blood flow more easily and can even make you feel less tired during exercise. That's part of why athletes sometimes drink beet juice before a big race. Golden beet. This one looks like it belongs in a treasure chest. Golden beets are a bright, sunny yellow-orange on the inside, and they taste a little sweeter and milder than red beets. One big difference is that they won't stain your hands or your plate the way red ones do, which is why chefs in fancy restaurants tend to love them. They roast up beautifully and turn even more golden in the oven. Golden beets have been around for centuries, but became more popular in recent decades as people started looking for vegetables that were both colorful and gentle in flavor. They're full of the same good things as red beets—folate, potassium, and fiber—just without the mess. Kyoja beet. Slice one of these open and you'll find something almost too pretty to eat. Kyoja beets have red and white rings inside, almost like a candy cane or a target. They came from a small fishing town in Italy called Kyoja, near Venice, and have been grown there since at least the 1800s. The taste is mild and earthy, a little sweeter than a regular red beet. One unusual thing about kyoja beets is that the rings tend to fade when you cook them, so some people eat them raw in salads to keep that beautiful pattern visible. They're one of the oldest known beet varieties, and they've been quietly stunning people for over 200 years. Sugar beet. This is one of the most important beets in the world, and most people have never seen one. Sugar beets are large, pale white or yellowish root vegetables that don't look much like the beets you'd find at a farmer's market. But they hold an enormous amount of sugar inside. Roughly 16 to 20 percent of their weight is pure sucrose. Around half of all the sugar produced in the United States and Europe comes from sugar beets, not from sugar cane. The process of extracting sugar from beets was discovered in the late 1700s by a German chemist named Andreas Margraf, and it changed how the world was fed. During the Napoleonic Wars, when Britain blocked sugar imports to France, Napoleon ordered thousands of acres of sugar beets to be planted so France could make its own sugar. Mengelwurzel. The name alone is worth stopping for. Mengelwurzel is a type of beet that was bred in the 1700s to feed farm animals, especially cattle and pigs during winter months when fresh grass wasn't available. They grow extremely large. Some can weigh over 20 pounds, and they store well through cold months. Farmers in Britain and Europe relied on them heavily before modern animal feed existed. In parts of rural England, there was even a tradition of carving mengelwurzels into lanterns for festivals, like a scruffier version of what people do with pumpkins today. They're edible for humans too, though a little bland and watery, and some people still grow them in heritage gardens out of curiosity. White beet. White beets are one of the quieter members of the beet family. They look a little plain from the outside, with pale skin and a creamy white interior, but their flavor is actually quite mild and slightly sweet, making them easy for people who find red beets too strong or earthy. White beets have been cultivated for a very long time. Some historians trace them back to ancient Greece. Because they don't have any of the red pigment called betaland that gives other beets their color, they don't stain anything, which makes them very easy to cook with. They can be roasted, mashed, or added to soups without changing the color of the dish at all. Cylindra beet. Most beets are round, but this one is shaped like a long, dark cylinder, almost like a thick carrot. Cylindra beets, sometimes called forminova beets, were developed in Denmark and became popular because of how easy they are to slice. When you cut a round beet, each slice is a different size. With a cylindra beet, nearly every slice comes out the same size and shape, which makes them ideal for pickling jars or serving on a plate. They grow deep into the soil rather than bulging out of the top, which actually makes them harder to harvest but very efficient in terms of how much beet you get from each plant. Chefs and home cooks who do a lot of pickling tend to love this variety. Detroit dark red beet. This is the most commonly grown garden beet in North America, and it's been that way for over 100 years. Detroit dark red beets were developed in the late 1800s and became famous for being reliable, smooth, and consistently round, which was important in an era when canning vegetables at home was a regular part of family life. They have a deep red color all the way through, a smooth skin without a lot of bumps, and a sweet, tender flavor when cooked. Seed companies still sell them today, almost unchanged from how they were a century ago. If someone grew up eating pickled beets from a jar, there's a good chance those beets were Detroit dark reds. Bull's blood beet. This variety is grown as much for its leaves as for its root. Bull's blood beets have dark, dramatic, deep red foliage that looks almost purple-black in certain lighting, and that made them popular in ornamental gardens long before people started eating them regularly. The roots are dark red and taste similar to other red beets, earthy and slightly sweet. The leaves are edible too and are used in salads, where their color adds a striking visual contrast. Bull's blood beets were popular in the 1800s and then drifted out of fashion before making a comeback in the era of gourmet cooking and edible landscaping. They're one of those vegetables that look as good in a garden as they taste on a plate. Lutz greenleaf beet. This one is unusual in the beet world because it was bred specifically to stay tender longer. Most beets get woody and tough as they grow large, but Lutz greenleaf beets, sometimes called winterkeeper beets, stay soft and sweet even when they reach a very large size. They were popular with gardeners who wanted to store beets through winter without them going tough or bitter. The greens stay usable for a long time too, which was a practical advantage when growing your own food was a necessity rather than a hobby. The flavor is mild and the texture holds up well whether you roast them, boil them, or store them in a root cellar for months. Chard. Chard is a beet that was bred for its leaves rather than its root. Botanically speaking, chard and garden beets are the same species, beta vulgaris, but chard was selected over generations to grow large, colorful, leafy stems instead of a swollen root. The stems can be white, yellow, red, or rainbow striped, and the leaves are large, glossy, and slightly bitter like spinach. Chard has been eaten in the Mediterranean for thousands of years and is one of the oldest cultivated vegetables in existence. Ancient Greeks and Romans grew it regularly. Today it's prized by cooks who want a leafy green that holds up to heat better than spinach and has a more interesting look on the plate. Spinach beet. Spinach beet is another leafy variety of beta vulgaris, and it's one of the oldest forms of the beet plant still grown today, possibly the original wild form before people started selecting for big roots. The leaves are smaller and more tender than regular chard, and the flavor is mild, making it a good substitute for actual spinach in cooked dishes. It's been cultivated in European kitchen gardens for centuries, though it's much less common in grocery stores than it once was. Some seed companies still carry it under old-fashioned names like perpetual spinach or leaf beet. Gardeners like it because the plant keeps producing fresh leaves for a very long time without bolting, meaning it doesn't rush to flower and go to seed the way actual spinach often does. Sea beet. Sea beet is the wild ancestor of every single beet on this list. It grows naturally along coastlines all across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, right at the edge of the ocean in salty, rocky soil where most plants can't survive. The roots are thin and branching, nothing like the fat, swollen root of a garden beet. The leaves are small, glossy, and slightly fleshy, and they're completely edible, slightly salty, tender, and a little rich-tasting. Humans have been gathering and eating sea beet leaves for thousands of years, long before anyone thought to cultivate the plant. Every beet variety ever developed—red beets, sugar beets, chard, mangelwurzel—traces its origins directly back to this small, scrappy coastal plant that still grows wild along cliff edges and pebbled beaches today. If you want to keep learning about everyday things in a simple and clear way, hitting subscribe only takes a second and helps us make more videos like this one. It's free and you can always change your mind later. Pacemaker beet. This older variety was bred in the mid-20th century for commercial production and became one of the go-to choices for canning factories. Pacemaker beets are round, smooth, and predictably uniform in size—qualities that matter enormously when you're running vegetables through an industrial canning line and need every beet to behave the same way. They have a mild, sweet flavor and hold their color well after being processed. While they've been largely replaced in commercial farming by newer hybrid varieties, pacemaker beets show up in seed catalogs for heritage vegetable enthusiasts. They're a quiet reminder of how much agricultural breeding went into making the canned beet section of a grocery store look as ordinary as it does. Badgerflame beet. This is one of the newer varieties in the beet world, developed at the University of Wisconsin. Badgerflame beets are golden orange with a bright interior, and unlike many beets, they have almost no earthy taste at all. That earthy flavor that puts a lot of people off beets comes from a natural compound called geosmin, and badgerflame beets contain very little of it. The result is a beet that tastes sweet, almost like a carrot or a piece of roasted squash, with none of the muddy undertone that divides people into beet lovers and beet haters. They can be eaten raw without any preparation at all, which is unusual for a beet. Plant breeders developed them partly as a way to introduce beets to people who had always said they didn't like them. Touchstone gold beet. Touchstone gold is a modern hybrid variety that became popular in farmer's markets and gourmet kitchens over the last couple of decades. It has a bright, clean golden interior and a smooth skin, and it holds its color extremely well when roasted, turning a deep, burnished amber that looks beautiful on a plate. The flavor is mild, sweet, and reliably consistent from one beet to the next, which is one of the reasons chefs liked it when it became widely available. It was bred to combine the best qualities of older golden varieties with better uniformity and shelf life. Touchstone gold also tends to be a little less bitter than red beets, making it a gentler starting point for anyone exploring beets for the first time. Crosby's Egyptian beet. This variety has a name that sounds ancient, and in some ways it is. Crosby's Egyptian beet was introduced to American gardeners in the 1800s and was one of the most popular beets grown in home gardens for decades before modern hybrids took over. Despite the name, it didn't actually come from Egypt. The Egyptian label was a common marketing term used in the 1800s to make vegetables sound exotic and impressive. The beet itself is dark red, slightly flattened in shape rather than perfectly round, and known for being one of the earliest maturing beets you can grow, meaning it's ready to harvest faster than most. Gardeners who want beets quickly in the season still reach for this one, and it remains a staple in heirloom seed collections around the world. Albina veriduna beet. This is one of the few truly white beets grown specifically for eating rather than sugar production. Albina veriduna beets, sometimes called snow-hite beets, have a creamy pale exterior and a pure white interior with a flavor that is noticeably sweeter and milder than most red varieties. They came from the Netherlands, where beet cultivation has a long and serious history. Because they contain no red or yellow pigment at all, they're completely mess-free to prepare, and their sweetness makes them popular with people who want to use beets in dishes without the strong earthy flavor. Roasted, they almost taste like a sweet potato. Some cooks use them in desserts and baked goods where a red beet would change the color of everything dramatically. MacGregor's favorite beet. Named after a Scottish horticulturalist in the 19th century, this heritage variety is one of the darkest beets in existence. MacGregor's favorite has an interior so deep red it borders on black, and the flavor is intensely earthy and rich. It was popular in Victorian kitchen gardens in Britain and appeared in seed catalogs for generations before largely disappearing during the 20th century when commercial farming favored smoother, more uniform varieties. A small community of heirloom seed savers kept it alive, and today it occasionally appears at heritage seed fairs and specialty nurseries. Growing it feels a little like growing a piece of garden history. The flavor is strong and complex in a way that mild modern hybrids rarely are. Egyptian turnip-rooted beet. This variety is related to Crosby's Egyptian but has a distinctly different shape, much flatter, almost disc-like, resembling a turnip more than a typical round beet. It was widely grown in Europe and America during the 1800s and valued for how quickly it matured and how well it kept in root cellars through winter. The flavor is mild and sweet, and the flat shape actually made it easier to pack into storage containers or canning jars without wasting space. Before refrigeration existed, these practical qualities made a real difference in how a family ate through the cold months. The variety is faded from mainstream gardening but remains available through heirloom seed networks for people interested in growing vegetables the way people did 200 years ago.