BEET AND CARROT NOODLE SALAD
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS With their dense texture, beets are an excellent candidate for spiralizing into vegetable “noodles.” Adding carrots made this salad even more visually stunning. The noodles’ crisp-tender texture was a perfect foil for the creamy, nutty, sweet-and-savory dressing. Tasters loved the contrast of flavors and textures. For the best noodles, use beets […]
CHARRED BEET SALAD
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS This charred salad reinvents and reinvigorates the pairing of creamy, salty goat cheese and earthy, sweet beets. After roasting foil-wrapped beets, we sliced and quickly charred them on the stovetop. This step essentially burned some of the sugar, adding pleasantly complementary bitterness. We amplified that with crisp radicchio and tossed it […]
MARINATED BEET SALAD WITH ORANGES AND PECORINO
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS For this sweet and savory salad, we enlisted our preferred roasting technique, but with a twist, wrapping the beets together in aluminum foil rather than individually. We then roasted them until they were soft and tender and their skins were ready to slip away. Peeling, cutting into wedges, and tossing the […]
BEET CHIPS
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS A snackable chip made from beets has become a popular and more healthful alternative to potato chips. Beet chips sounded delightful, but we were skeptical about getting truly crisp results without any special equipment. Indeed, many of the recipes we tested produced chips that were leathery and floppy, or overcooked and […]
BEET MUHAMMARA
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS Traditional muhammara is a sweet-smoky blend of roasted red peppers, toasted walnuts, pomegranate molasses, and Turkish or Syrian spices. It makes a delicious dip for crudités or pita, a spread for sandwiches, or a sauce for meat and fish. Ours incorporates beets, which gives it a splendid color and deeper flavor. […]
PICKLED BEETS
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS To create a recipe that had nothing in common with the one-dimensional, mushy, cloying pickled beets that line supermarket shelves, we started by briefly roasting our beets in the oven to concentrate their flavor and make them just tender enough to peel. Cutting them into ⅓-inch-thick slices helped the beets stay […]
BRAISED BEETS WITH LEMON AND ALMONDS
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS We sought a streamlined stovetop recipe for beets that maximized their sweet, earthy flavor—with minimal mess. Braising worked perfectly. We partially submerged the beets in just 1¼ cups of water so that they partially simmered and partially steamed. Halving the beets cut down our cooking time. In just 45 minutes, the […]
ROASTED BEETS
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS The flavor of roasted fresh beets is head-and-shoulders above that of the canned version. They are intensely sweet and firm, rather than tinny, tangy, and mushy. So how, exactly, do you roast a beet? We tried several different methods. The first approach simply blasted untrimmed beets in a hot oven. While […]
SAUTÉED BEET GREENS WITH RAISINS AND ALMONDS
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS If you find beet greens attached to the beets at your market, please bring them home with you—they are mild and delicious. Among blanching, steaming, microwaving, and wilting, we found the simplest, most straightforward recipe for these tender greens to be wilting on the stovetop. We simply tossed the leaves, still […]
CALIFORNIA BARLEY BOWLS WITH AVOCADO SNOW PEAS AND LEMON MINT YOGURT SAUCE
WHY THIS RECIPE WORKS For a fresh, California-style take on wildly popular rice bowls, we swapped the rice for hearty barley and paired it with snow peas, chunks of ripe avocado, and toasted spiced sunflower seeds. While the barley cooked, we sautéed the snow peas with some coriander and toasted the sunflower seeds with lots […]