Recipes – № 15
Shaved Root Vegetable Salad
When we celebrated our first Thankstaking in late fall of 2010, our friend Pradnya brought a salad that was a revelation, and a perfect compliment to our meat-focused feast. She shaved a number of raw, brightly colored root vegetables including red and golden beets, carrots and watermelon radishes, mixed them with shaved fennel and dressed them with nothing more than olive oil, lemon juice and chives. The result was like therapy for the seasonal eater in winter: A visual firework of yellow, orange and red, the crunch of raw vegetables and a lemony dressing that tasted like sunshine. Every year Pradnya asks if she could try something new and contribute a different appetizer to our made-up annual celebration, but our reply is always the same: please bring the same salad as last year and don’t you change a thing.
The following recipe is just one possible combination of root vegetables that I think balances the flavors and colors particularly well. You can of course let your imagination run wild and use any combination of carrots, beets, radishes and turnips and combine them with fennel and chives to paint your own masterpiece. Red, golden and especially Chioggia beets as well as watermelon, purple daikon and green Korean meat radishes are all stunning when sliced thinly.
Serves 8
1 large orange carrot
1 small Korean meat radish or other medium-sized radish
1 1/2 large fennel bulbs. It’s best to use large bulbs as this will result in larger, more attractive fennel shavings.
1 red beet
A small handful of chives
½ cup of fresh lemon juice (from about 1.5 lemons)
6 Tbsp olive oil
Equipment: mandoline
Whisk together the lemon juice, olive oil and salt and set aside. For reference, I use about 1 Tbsp of fine sea salt in this dish, but you should rely on your taste buds and you can add more salt later. Fill a large bowl with water and ice cubes and submerge a colander in it.
Wash and trim the root ends off the golden beet, carrot and radish (but not the red beet). Peel the golden beet and carrot (no need to peel the radish). Holding the stem ends, shave the golden beet, carrot and radish on a mandoline into slices a little less than 1mm thick. Clean and trim the fennel bulbs, making sure there isn’t any grit between the outer layers. Slice in half lengthwise, leaving the cores intact as they will help hold the fennel together. Shave the fennel at a thicker setting, about 1.5mm, unitl all that's left are the fennel cores, which are discarded. Place the fennel and shaved root vegetables (other than the red beet) into the colander in the ice bath. The ice bath crisps the vegetables, preserves the bright colors and allows you to serve the salad nicely chilled before the salt draws out the moisture from the vegetables.
Now wash, trim, peel and shave (at a little less than 1mm) the red beet and place the slices into a separate small bowl filled with ice water. Keeping the red beet separate from the other vegetables until serving prevents everything from turning uniformly pink.
Wash the chives and cut them into 2 inch pieces. Thoroughly drain the vegetables in the colander and place them in another (dry) large bowl. Drain the water (and any ice cubes) from the small bowl with the red beet. Give the dressing a fresh whisk and dress the shaved vegetables in each bowl. Add more salt as needed. Serve immediately by placing most of the red beet slices on the plates first, then add the other vegetables (partially covering the red beets), then the remaining red beet slices and finally sprinkle with some chive sticks.
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