How To make Beet Salad With Goat Cheese and Candied Pecans

This Beet Salad is a really good dish to serve either as a Main or a first course when you want to impress your guests. The combination of the Goat Cheese, Candied Pecans and Orange Vinaigrette provides sweet, sour, acid, smooth and crunchy all at once.

This recipe is naturally gluten free

Watch A Video

Here is a video of 2 Cooks in the Kitchen making Beet Salad With Goat Cheese and Candied Pecans:

Ingredients For Beet Salad With Goat Cheese and Candied Pecans

• Beets – Cleaned and trimmed
• 3/4 cup Pecans – chopped
• 2 Tbls Maple Syrup
• Lettuce
• 4 oz or more Goat Cheese – crumbled
• 1/4 Cup Frozen Orange Juice Concentrate
• 1/4 Cup Oil
• 1/8 Cup Balsamic Vinegar

Roast the Beets

We start by roasting our beets. First we will wash them. Beets grow in the ground and even though they have been cleaned before you buy them it is necessary to wash them again. You also want to cut off any extra roots hanging from them. Then we will rub oil all over the beets. You can do this over the baking pan so any spillage is contained.

Cover the Pan

We will cover the pan tightly with foil. The steam is a major factor in cooking the beets and we don’t want it to escape from the pan.

Bake At 400° For 90 Minutes

We’ll bake our beets at 400° for 90 minutes. You don’t even need to check on their progress, you can just ignore them for the whole 90 minutes. At that time we’ll take them out of the oven and let them cool enough to handle.

Peel the Beets

Once the beets are cool enough we need to peel them. We wear latex gloves for this job as the beet juice will stain your hands. Often the peel just slides off when you rub the beets. You can rub them with a paper towel. The rough surface helps sometimes. If all else fails we will use a vegetable peeler to get the most stubborn skins off. Then we’ll cut the beets into cubes and set aside.

Make the Candied Pecans

We use whole pecans and chop them up. You can find pecan pieces which will work just fine. We just put the pecans on a cutting board and chop away with a rock-and-chop motion.

Toast the Pecans

Next we put our pecans in a dry pan over medium heat. You’ll want to stir these from time to time so they heat evenly.

Add Maple Syrup

After 5 to 10 minutes the pecans will start to smell a little toasted. Then we can pour on the maple syrup. We will stir the pecans to get them coated and then turn off the heat and let them cool. We try to spread them out in the pan while they cool so they don’t all stick together as much.

Make the Orange Vinaigrette

We’ll make the dressing in a pint jar so we can just shake it to mix it. We want to put equal parts orange juice concentrate and olive oil with half as much vinegar. You can scale this recipe to make more or less dressing using those proportions. We have found orange juice concentrate in a resealable container that we keep in the freezer to make this dressing.

Olive Oil

We like to use a high quality olive oil for salad dressings so we get something a little better than the oil we cook with. We’ll add an amount equal to the orange juice concentrate, in this case 1/4 cup.

Balsamic Vinegar

Again, we like to use a quality balsamic vinegar. We’ll use half as much as the olive oil, in this case 1/8 cup.

Shake Well

That’s all there is to our dressing. You just shake it well and it is ready to serve. You can quickly make this dressing for other salads as well.

Assemble the Beet Salad

We’ll start making our salad by filling the bowls with lettuce. It’s nice when we can grow our own but that is only possible certain times of the year. We like to use bitter lettuce for this salad but you can use any lettuce you want.

Optional Hot Sauce

One half of the 2 Cooks likes to put hot sauce or chile oil on his salads. This is totally optional and you can skip it if you like.

Add Pecans

By now our pecans should be cool enough to put on the salads. We just sprinkle them generously over the salad.

Add the Beets

Now we can add our beet cubes that we set aside earlier. We’ll be generous with these.

Goat Cheese

We like the combination of the tangy goat cheese and the sort of sweet, earthy beet flavor. We happen to have one of the best goat cheese makers, Cypress Grove, located at the end of our street. Their Humboldt Fog line is a perfect cheese for this dish.

Inside the Cheese

When you cut open the cheese you’ll see a layer of rind, a layer of gooey cheese and then the crumbly middle. The rind and the gooey cheese are the strongest flavored while the crumbly middle is less pungent. You can choose how much of the outside you want in your salad.

Crumble the Cheese

Now we’ll just crumble the cheese over the salads. You can make the pieces as large or small as you’d like.

Add the Dressing

Then we just pour the dressing over the salad. We try to be careful not to get too much dressing but you can do it your way.

Garnish With Edible Flowers

We eat with our eyes first so we like to present a beautiful, well garnished dish. We have the nice red color of the beets to augment so some red dahlia petals and blue borage flowers will really brighten up the look of our salad. Onion flowers are also a nice touch on this salad with their little white stars.

We have a lot of other gluten free salad recipes you can try:

• Miss Kelly’s Blue Cheese Dressing
• Bacon Blue Cheese Chopped Wedge Salad
• Green Goddess Salad Dressing and Dip
• Wilted Spinach Salad
• Caesar Salad
• Kale Caesar Salad
• Kale and Quinoa Salad
• Taco Salad

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