If food is fashion, then there must always be a new “it” dish. This season, salt-roasted root vegetables are the Olivia Wilde of the culinary world.

They grace menus in Copenhagen (salt-baked beet with smoked marrow, pickled onions and elderberry capers), New York (salt-baked celery root with leek, ash and citrus cream) and, of course, Washington, where you can find salt-roasted carrots at Fiola, salt-roasted beet salad with spiced Virginia peanuts and goat cheese at Blue Duck Tavern and salt-roasted potatoes and beets accompanying the local pheasant at Equinox. At Volt in Frederick, chef-owner Bryan Voltaggio has experimented with salt-roasting celery root in a crust scented with celery seed and says the root’s resulting silky texture is akin to that of sashimi.

Salt roasting is not new. Along the Mediterranean, it has been used for centuries to keep fish flaky and moist. In China, the Hakka people for more than 2,000 years have roasted chickens by burying them in hot salt. “No one is reinventing the wheel here,” says Fabio Trabocchi, chef-owner of Fiola and Casa Luca. “This is one of those ancient culinary techniques that still resonates with us today.”

The technique, which involves burying the vegetables in dry salt or beneath a crust of salt and egg whites, has obvious appeal to chefs. It roasts! It steams! It seasons! And wait, there’s more. It also helps to gussy up the description of otherwise humble root vegetables on the menu. When a salt crust is presented and cracked open tableside, as chef Alain Passard does at L’Arpège in Paris, the technique might even justify a price hike.

“It’s the closest thing to sous vide you can get for the home cook,” says Dan Barber, chef at New York’s Blue Hill, referring to that other fashionable cooking technique, in which meats and vegetables are sealed in plastic and cooked in a water bath at very low temperatures to seal in flavor and promote even cooking.

“The name of the game is consistency,” says Adam Sobel, the chef at Washington’s Bourbon Steak before moving this year to RN74 in San Francisco. “So if this gets you a perfectly evenly cooked beet, why wouldn’t you do it?”

I found out the hard way.

My first attempt was dry-roasting beets. I bought two bunches, making sure that the beets were of similar size. I scrubbed them clean but left on the skins to prevent the salt from penetrating too deeply. Next, I poured kosher salt about an inch thick in the bottom of a small pan and layered the beets on top. I covered the beets with more salt and stuck them in the oven, preheated to 325 degrees. So far, so good.

Recipes advised that the beets would take about 45 minutes. But the timer buzzed, and the beet I pierced with a knife to test for doneness was still as hard as a rock. I checked again at an hour and then another half-hour later. I was afraid to check too often, lest too many punctures of the skin render the beets inedibly salty.

At one hour and 45 minutes, my tester showed they were done, and I pulled the beets from the oven. While they were still warm, I peeled them. I glazed them with butter, then topped them with chopped chives, chervil and grated ricotta salata.