Passover Salad

Roasted Root Vegetables with a Fresh Horseradish Dill Yogurt Dressing

  • Roasted Root Vegetables with a Fresh Horseradish Dill Yogurt Dressing
  • Roasted Root Vegetables with a Fresh Horseradish Dill Yogurt Dressing
  • Roasted Root Vegetables with a Fresh Horseradish Dill Yogurt Dressing
  • Roasted Root Vegetables with a Fresh Horseradish Dill Yogurt Dressing
  • Roasted Root Vegetables with a Fresh Horseradish Dill Yogurt Dressing
  • Roasted Root Vegetables with a Fresh Horseradish Dill Yogurt Dressing
  • Roasted Root Vegetables with a Fresh Horseradish Dill Yogurt Dressing

NOTES

Make sure to let the vegetables cook all the way through, a half-cooked beet is not a nice thing.

INSTRUCTIONS

Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees.

Scrub root vegetables well with steel wool. Do not remove the skin, they add texture and nutrients to the dish.

Remove tops of beets (reserve for another time), including the very gnarly top of the root where it tense to be the dirtiest. Cut beets into 1” cubes, add to a mixing bowl.

Add beets to a bowl and coat with olive oil, salt and pepper.

Scrub fingerling potatoes and slice into 1” pieces. Slice carrots into 1” pieces. Add to a separate bowl from beets, and toss with olive oil, salt and pepper. I like to keep the carrots and potatoes separate from the beets for as long as I can so that they maintain their own color and don’t just absorb all the red from the beets. Do not wash your mixing bowls, you will use them again shortly.

You can add both the beets and potatoes, and the carrots to the same sheet pan, pushing the two groups to opposite sides, or you can roast the veggies on two separate pans. Or, if you don’t care, mix them all together and save yourself the trouble.

Add pan(s) to the hot oven and roast for 45 minutes, moving the veggies around on the pan every 15 minutes or so to ensure that they cook evenly. After 30 minutes, toss your garlic in with the veggies. This way, the garlic won’t burn. Reserve about 1/2 tsp of garlic for the dressing.

When the vegetables are caramelized and soft all the way through (should be after about 45 minutes), remove from the oven and allow to cool to room temp.

In a small dish combine yogurt, 1/2 tsp fresh garlic, olive oil and red wine vinegar. Use a micro-grater to shave a little less than 1 tbs fresh horseradish into the dressing. Taste the dressing. If you want more of a punch, add more horseradish.

RECIPE

DIFFICULTY

MODERATE

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SERVES

6

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PREP TIME

60 MINS

Vegetables

  • 1 
    lb 
    heirloom carrots, I used three different colors here, but orange will work if you cannot find these different varietals
  • 3 - 4 
     
    medium red beets
  • 1/2 lb 
     
    fingerling potatoes (Use any root veggies you like, add parsnip, rutabaga, turnip)
  • 3 
     
    cloves garlic
  •  
     
    Olive Oil
  • 1 
    tbs 
    finely grated fresh horseradish root (You can use bottled horseradish, but I highly suggest the real thing)
  • 1/4 
    cup 
    fresh dill plus extra for garnish
  • 1/2 
     
    small red onion
  • 1/4 
    cup 
    sunflower shoots (optional to add at the end to lighten the dish up)

Dressing

  • 1/4 
    cup 
    olive oil
  • 1 
    cup 
    whole milk organic yogurt (get the best quality you can find)
  • 1 
    tbs 
    red wine vinegar
  •  
     
    sea salt and cracked black pepper to taste

INSTRUCTIONS

Pre-heat oven to 425 degrees.

Scrub root vegetables well with steel wool. Do not remove the skin, they add texture and nutrients to the dish.

Remove tops of beets (reserve for another time), including the very gnarly top of the root where it tense to be the dirtiest. Cut beets into 1” cubes, add to a mixing bowl.

Add beets to a bowl and coat with olive oil, salt and pepper.

Scrub fingerling potatoes and slice into 1” pieces. Slice carrots into 1” pieces. Add to a separate bowl from beets, and toss with olive oil, salt and pepper. I like to keep the carrots and potatoes separate from the beets for as long as I can so that they maintain their own color and don’t just absorb all the red from the beets. Do not wash your mixing bowls, you will use them again shortly.

You can add both the beets and potatoes, and the carrots to the same sheet pan, pushing the two groups to opposite sides, or you can roast the veggies on two separate pans. Or, if you don’t care, mix them all together and save yourself the trouble.

Add pan(s) to the hot oven and roast for 45 minutes, moving the veggies around on the pan every 15 minutes or so to ensure that they cook evenly. After 30 minutes, toss your garlic in with the veggies. This way, the garlic won’t burn. Reserve about 1/2 tsp of garlic for the dressing.

When the vegetables are caramelized and soft all the way through (should be after about 45 minutes), remove from the oven and allow to cool to room temp.

In a small dish combine yogurt, 1/2 tsp fresh garlic, olive oil and red wine vinegar. Use a micro-grater to shave a little less than 1 tbs fresh horseradish into the dressing. Taste the dressing. If you want more of a punch, add more horseradish.

It’s Passover, one of the most iconic of the Jewish High Holidays. This entire week on SFP will be dedicated to Passover, as I will be attending one seder, hosting another, and making wood oven fired Matzoh in the North Fork of Long Island on Friday with chef and cookbook author, Peter Berley. Stay tuned for all my absolutely fabulously Jewish adventures.

At first glance, Passover appears to be an impressively morbid holiday. We thank God for having “passed over” the houses of enslaved Jews while enacting the last of his infamous ten plagues: killing the first born of every Egyptian household. This is the climax of a story that begins with the rivers turning to blood, the earth crawling with bugs, frogs, and roving herds of wild beasts who destroyed the earth (see illustrations by my niece, Jordan). The people broke out in boils and the earth was thrown into a thick, impenetrable darkness. Yes, God is portrayed as quite a masochist in this portion of the Bible, hardly something to celebrate. But, like most things in the Jewish religion, Passover is wonderfully open to interpretation, and food is always an essential symbolic tool for storytelling.

One of my favorite pieces of the seder plate (the plate of symbolic foods used as a visual aid throughout the seder) is the “bitter herb” or, horseradish root. The horseradish root symbolizes the bitterness of slavery, but of course, if used correctly, horseradish is an excellent culinary tool. I mean really, haven’t we suffered enough?

This Root Vegetable Salad will be my contribution to my family seder tonight. I was tasked with bringing a salad that could sit, without getting soggy or wilted on the way to my uncle’s house, 1 hour away. But, the salad could not include any wheat, barley, rye, oats, and spelt, beans, peas, rice, millet, corn, seeds or legumes. These are all the classic no-wilt salad basics. Why are these ingredients forbidden? Because on Passover we do not eat anything that puffs up or expands in the cooking process, as the Jews in exile from Egypt did not have time to let their bread leaven, or “puff up.”

Luckily, I work best with perimeters.

This salad is Kosher for Passover, and incorporates the “bitter herb” (horseradish) in the dressing in a way that your guests won’t expect. If you are traveling to a seder with this salad, bring a little ziploc baggy of fresh dill wrapped in a damp paper towel to use as garnish just before serving. Do your best not to refrigerate the salad before serving, unless you live somewhere very hot.