Pickled mixed vegetables are the punchy, bright and crunchy topping that elevates simple meals into a full textural experience. Turn sweet roasted beets, crisp radishes, and bold red onion into a stunning monochromatic condiment to admire and enjoy.

This recipe, featuring roasted beets, is a major upgrade to your typical quick pickle recipe. It guarantees color, flavor, and texture on your plate.

Making Pickled Veggies with Roasted Beets

The unique part about this recipe is that you’ll roast beets before pickling them. Roasting brings out all the natural, caramel sweetness of red beets. Plus, it makes pickles that are toothsome and soft, rather than hard and snappy.

Roasting beets is one of my personal favorite ways to cook the veggie. You can roast up a huge batch and pickle some. Then use others to make a bright flatbread with roasted beet purée, ricotta, and thyme. Serve up your masterpiece with a summery roasted beet cocktail and round out the meal with my vegan green goddess broccoli salad, complete with—you guessed it—roasted beets!

After roasting the beets for the pickles, add them to glass pickling jars along with red radishes and onion. Add a pickling liquid made from apple cider vinegar, coriander, fennel seeds, lime juice, pink peppercorns, salt, and agave. You can skip the agave if you like, though it adds a natural sweetness that balances out the other acidic ingredients nicely.

Quick Pickled Veggies

Yield: 1 large or 2 medium sized jars

This quick pickled vegetable recipe is extremely versatile. I love pairing veggies that follow a color theme. Here I’ve chosen a bright pink look with red onion, radish and beets. Alternatively, you can swap these veggies for a different set like cucumber and turnip. Just add some fresh dill within the last hour before serving. The agave is optional pending your preference for sweetness. It balances out the vinegar without using a traditional method of added white sugar.

Ingredients

3 small - medium roasted beets, quartered lengthwise
2 bunches (about 12 ounces) radishes, trimmed, thinly sliced with mandoline
1 large red onion, trimmed, thinly sliced
12 ounces (1 ½ cups) apple cider vinegar, organic
20 ounces (2 ½ cups) filtered water
½ tablespoon coriander, whole
½ tablespoon fennel seeds, whole
½ ounces (or half of 1 medium) lime, freshly juiced
1 teaspoon pink peppercorns, whole
½ teaspoon sea salt
1 tablespoon agave (optional)

Instructions

Start by preparing roasted beets. Preheat oven to 425 degrees. Rinse beets. Cut off each end. Peel and quarter.
Place on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Drizzle with olive oil and sprinkle very lightly with sea salt.
Place in the oven and roast for 25-30 minutes or until soft when pierced with a fork. Remove and allow it to cool to room temperature.
Gather all remaining ingredients. Add to a large bowl. Stir.
Place ingredients in glass jar(s). Finish with placing beets in a jar carefully as a last step.
Seal and cool in the fridge for at least 30 minutes before enjoying. Store for up to 1 week.

How to Use Pickled Vegetables

Once your jars are cooled and crunchy, it’s time to dig in. Feel free to enjoy straight out of the jar. And here are some of my other favorite ways to make the most of my homemade pickled veggies:

Top avocado toast
Toss into fresh salads
Add a cooling element on the side of creamy curries
As a crunchy and tangy addition to cheese or crudité boards

Other Vegetables to Pickle

You can customize this handy base recipe to pickle nearly any crunchy vegetable. I love the play on warm red and purple hues in one jar, but there are plenty of other tones in the vegetable world to experiment with.

For more easy and beautiful monochrome jars of pickled veggies, try:

Cucumbers, white onion, and green beans
Red bell peppers, carrots, and lemon peel
Parsnips, daikon, and cauliflower
Fennel, ginger, and asparagus

You can also mix up the pickling flavorings and spices. Here are some ideas to mix up the taste profile of your quick pickles:

Sliced fresh turmeric root
Sprigs of hardy herbs like rosemary, tarragon, and thyme
Sliced or whole garlic cloves
Other whole spices like cinnamon, anise, and black peppercorns
Try other vinegar, like red wine, rice or balsamic

Do you love beets as much as I do? Then be sure to try the other recipes in my beet series linked above and stay in touch on Instagram, where I’m always adding new recipes like this one!