Ease of Peeling

• When you boil beets, their outsides grow soft enough that you can simply rub away the peels. In fact, testing to see whether the skin of a boiled beet rubs away easily is one way to tell whether the beet is tender all the way through. Remove a beet from the boiling water with a pair of tongs, run it under cold water until it is cool enough to handle, and then test it to see whether the skin comes off with gentle fingertip pressure.

Deepened Flavor

• As you cook beets in boiling water, their flavor mellows. Raw beets start out with a bright, earthy sweetness reminiscent of carrots. As they cook, they develop a deeper taste that balances other ingredients in soups and blends easily with the flavors of tart and savory marinades, while still retaining a fundamental sweetness.

Subtle Change in Color

• Although red beets leech enough color into their boiling liquid to turn it a deep magenta, the beets themselves nonetheless retain their deep redness even after you boil them. Although they are still colorful after they are fully cooked, boiled beets take on a mellower shade with a brownish tone, as opposed to the pinkish shade of raw beets. The color of gold beets similarly grows mellow rather than bright from boiling. However, Chiogga beets, which have bright pink concentric circles when raw, become dull pink most of the way through when you boil them.

Tender Texture

• Like most other foods, beets grow softer as you boil them. The longer you boil them, the softer they become. Being especially firm at the outset, beets are quite forgiving as they soften during the boiling process, almost never growing soft enough to fall apart. There is a wide range of acceptable done-ness for boiled beets. Because they can even be eaten raw, boiled beets benefit from light cooking that renders them just tender, like lightly steamed carrots. They are equally appealing when boiled to the softness of room temperature butter.