This recipe is to be made with roasted or steamed beets! Steamed beets will be tender and clean in flavor, while roasted beets will have more depth to them, let your heart guide you.
This batch will be enough soup to make 8 small bowls.
Overview
Using a blender, puree fully-cooked beets, allium confit, and water to make your soup!
Roast 5-6 large beets, or if they are smaller 8 is a fine number.
To make the Confit
In a radial fashion, cut one large yellow (or white) onion and load it into a small saucepan. Add to this:
3 cloves Garlic
1 bay leaf
12 sprigs of thyme
3-4 black peppercorns
Small pinch of red chili flakes (if that's something you're into)
A pinch of salt
Cover with 1-2 cups of olive oil. The idea here is to have a small saucepan that can be loaded pretty full, and everything in it can be submerged with a relatively small volume of liquid; so consider something that is pretty short from wall-to-wall.
Bring it up to a very gentle simmer--not a boil--as we want to cook/soften all of this vegetable matter without frying it.
Allow 10-15min cook time, starting after you have noted bubbles beginning to rise from the vegetables.
**NOTE! We are going to blend things in a blender that are still hot! THIS IS A DANGEROUS ACTIVITY. Which doesn't mean you should avoid it; quite to the contrary, it means you SHOULD do it, and do it carefully. This is an act of deepening one's self-assurance.**