Marinated Beet Salad with Fresh Orange
Marinated Beet Salad with Fresh Orange
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Beets:
3 pounds golden beets
3½ tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, divided
¼ teaspoon kosher salt, plus more to taste
⅓ cup water
1 tablespoon freshly squeezed lemon juice
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Vinaigrette:
Juice of 3 medium oranges
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
3 tablespoons freshly squeezed orange juice
1 medium shallot peeled and diced small (3 tablespoons)
Kosher salt, to taste
Freshly ground black pepper, to taste
Adjust an oven rack to the middle position, then preheat the oven to 350ºF.
Cut off the greens half an inch above the beets. Scrub the beets.
In a roasting pan large enough to hold the beets in one layer, add the beets, then drizzle
with 1½ tablespoons of olive oil, the salt and water. Cover tightly with aluminum foil,
place on a sheet pan and roast in the oven for approximately 50 minutes to an hour, or
until the beets are easily pierced with the tip of a knife. Remove from the oven, remove
the foil and allow to cool.
When the beets are cool enough to handle, using a not-so-important hand cloth, wipe the
beet skins off and discard them.
Cut the beets into wedges, place them in a bowl, then combine 2 tablespoons of olive oil
and 1 tablespoon lemon juice in a cup and drizzle over the beets. Fold to combine. Season
to taste with salt and pepper.
In a medium container with a tight fitting lid, combine the vinaigrette ingredients, close
the lid tightly, and shake well to combine. Or, whisk to combine the ingredients in a
medium-sized bowl.
Gently toss the beets and orange segments with your hands, then dress with half the
vinaigrette. Season to taste with salt and pepper and additional vinaigrette to taste.
Serve and enjoy.
About Joe Lamp'l
Joe Lamp'l is the Host and Executive Producer of the award winning PBS television series Growing A Greener World. Off camera, Joe dedicates his time to promoting sustainability through his popular books, blog, podcast series, and nationally syndicated newspaper columns. Follow Joe on Twitter
Your beets salad is out of the world. It was the best beets in any form or shape I’ve ever tasted.
….fantastic answer to Claudia’s question about salt….I’ve always wondered about the differences & Chef Nathan’s answer is the most thorough I’ve ever read. (I’m going with kosher from now on!) Thanks to him for taking the time to respond. He is a born teacher & all that’s good about being one:)
Isn’t it supposed to be 3 tablespoons freshly squeezed LEMON not orange juice in the vinaigrette? Combining the two is an an excellent idea, it should brighten both the dressing and the salad as you stated in the episode.
Hello, Claudia.
Thank you for taking the time out of your day to share your question with me, and an excellent one at that.
I love salt and everything about it.
The best way for me to answer your question is to take a look back into time before humans came onto the scene. Kosher salt is “sea salt” (from oceans long gone) that is mined from the earth in the purest form possible (before humans began dumping trash, toxins and heavy metals into our oceans) whereas sea salt is made with today’s ocean water via evaporation in real time.
When it comes to teaching, as I do on “Growing A Greener World” and via my seasonal cookbook “Great Food Starts Fresh” (www.chefnathanlyon.com) I always err on the side of consistency for the home cook and therefore use Kosher as some “Sea Salts” vary in grain size making the finished product unpredictable and/or a particular brand of sea salt difficult to attain depending on where you live and what stores you happen to frequent. Sea salt can vary in flavor and color due to salinity and mineral levels around the world’s oceans, whereas Kosher salt is fairly consistent both in flavor and grain size.
For arguments sake, most all salts are approximately 97.5 percent sodium chloride so the volume that the minerals take up is almost negligible. That said, those same minerals are what give those different sea salts their unique flavor and color. However it’s best to keep in mind that most of those unique flavors are lost when the salt is either cooked or dissolved which is why “finishing salts” have become quite popular as of late, as they are not cooked, rather sprinkled over the finished dish for both texture and flavor. Smoked salts do retain their flavor when cooked or dissolved due to the wood’s naturally occurring oils that cling to the salt when burned/smoked.
Table salt has an added anti-caking ingredient (calcium silicate) that keeps it from clumping inside your local restaurant’s salt shakers that you find on the table next to the pre-ground black pepper shaker. It has a very fine grain that dissolves quickly in solution. It’s size: almost three times as small as Kosher. For example, my beet salad recipe states to use 1/4 teaspoon (plus more to taste) Kosher. If one were to substitute 1/4 teaspoon table salt that would be equivalent to three times as much salt as I’ve instructed for my recipe. Equally as important to note is if I stated to use “1/4 teaspoon sea salt” instead of “Kosher” the home cook could be using a particular brand of “sea salt coarse crystals” (chunky grains) or another with “Fleur de sel” -which has a very delicate flake. Both are “sea salt” but their volume per measurement varies greatly.
That, and keep in mind I can’t name any specific brands on PBS such as “Baleine” or “NOS Régions ont du Talent” or “Morton”, be the subject salt, olive oil, sauté pans, or ovens.
At the end of the day, Claudia, when it comes to salt, it’s all about consistency, and because brand of sea salt you have on offer at home provides you with delicious, consistent results I would recommend not changing a darn thing.
Excellent, excellent question.
I hope I answered your question.
Happy cooking!
Your chef,
Nathan
Your Marinated Beet Salad looks yummy. I look forward to trying it.
I’m curious, though, about why you always use kosher salt? I, personally, prefer sea salt, because the naturally occurring minerals add nutrition and decrease sodium, since the included minerals take up space, so the sodium content is actually less per teaspoon, than kosher and table salt.
I have seen online that chefs use kosher salt, because it adds flavor. Yet, unless iodine has been added (as in “Iodized Salt”), kosher salt and table salt are both Sodium chloride, making them chemically identical. Exept for the size of the grain (with kosher salt being larger), they are the same thing. l have used kosher salt and don’t notice an improvement in flavor over sea salt. Therefor, I prefer to use sea salt.