Here's a carrot salad recipe that's better than the usual one. No raisins, this one adds toasted sunflower or pumpkin seeds, which works great for me, and I wanted to share it with you.
Many carrot recipes fail for me, they are too sweet and don't have the best ingredients in them. This one climbs the ladder, and it should, considering the recipe came from a french bakery cookbook.
A friend of mine works at the Rose Bakery in NYC, and I tried their carrot salad, and then bought their well done cookbook, Breakfast, Lunch, Tea. This a variation on their carrot salad recipe. They suggest olive oil or sunflower oil for the dressing, I opted for canola. I think olive oil would not work with this, but now that I am writing this, I am wondering if I should try it with olive oil.
Time to grate some more carrots.
And on grating carrots - use the food processor, not a box grater. The box grater I have only has large holes for grating, and I don't like how the carrots look after going through the large holes of the grater. I use the smallest holes of the discs that came with my food processor, and whipped through a bunch of carrots in record time. In the video you can see just how fast and how nice the grated carrot looks.
When adding the dressing to the carrots, you might want to drain off some of the dressing if it collects in the bottom of the bowl. I found I had too much dressing for the amount of carrots I grated. But this is all eye of the beholder stuff, if you like a lot of dressing, leave it in. I used sunflower seeds in this version, but pumpkin seeds will work also. The small pumpkin seeds, pepitas, are good. The large ones won't work, I think.
- 8 carrots finely grated in food processor
- 1 cup pumpkin or sunflower seeds toasted
- ½ cup chopped chives or scallion greens
- ½ cup lemon juice - its ok to use bottled juice
- 3 tablespoons canola oil
- 1 tablespoon super fine sugar
- salt & pepper for dressing
- Grate the carrots, and toast the seeds, combine carrots and seeds in a bowl with the chives.
- Whisk the lemon juice with the sugar and some salt and pepper. Its best if the lemon juice is warm, so the sugar dissolves well. Mix in the oil to complete the dressing.
- Pour the dressing over the salad and toss. If too much dressing collects in the bottom, you might want to pour off some of the dressing, saving it for some other food project.
- Taste and add salt and pepper to suite your taste. Be careful with the salt, you can't undo too much salt.