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Roasted Beet Salad with Feta and Walnuts

Beets roasted in foil until they slip out of their skins, with salty feta and walnuts toasted to the edge of burning.

Prep
15 min
Cook
1 hr
Makes
Serves 6
Jump to the recipe
Beet salad with crumbled feta, walnuts and micro greens
Photo: Vladimír Sládek / Pexels

Boiled beets leach their color and about half their flavor into the water. Roasted whole in foil, they lose nothing — the parcel traps the steam, the sugars concentrate, and the skins slip off under a thumb afterwards without a peeler or purple hands.

Wrap them whole and unpeeled. Cut beets bleed; whole ones do not.

Toast the walnuts properly, until they smell nutty and are a shade darker than looks safe. Raw walnuts are bitter and slightly astringent, and that bitterness fights the sweetness of the beets. Toasting drives off the volatile compounds responsible and brings out the oils. Four minutes in a dry pan, shaking constantly, and never walk away — they go from perfect to acrid in about twenty seconds.

Dress the beets while they are still warm. Warm vegetables absorb vinaigrette; cold ones wear it. For a salad that needs no dressing trick at all, green fruit salad relies on lime to do two jobs at once.

For the plated version with goat cheese, see beet and goat cheese salad.

Feta last and by hand. Crumbled with fingers it stays in soft irregular pieces; cut with a knife it turns to rubble.

A bunch of fresh beet with stalks
Photo: webdesignnewcastle / Pixabay

Beet salad with feta: the card

Beets roasted in foil until they slip out of their skins, with salty feta and walnuts toasted to the edge of burning.

Salad and dressing

For the salad

  • 2 lb (900 g) beets, scrubbed, tops trimmed
  • 2 tbsp olive oil, for roasting
  • 1 cup (100 g) walnut halves
  • 7 oz (200 g) feta
  • 3½ oz (100 g) arugula or mixed leaves
  • Handful of dill

For the dressing

  • 4 tbsp olive oil
  • 2 tbsp red wine vinegar
  • 1 tbsp honey
  • 1 tsp Dijon mustard
  • Salt and black pepper

Roasting the beets, toasting the walnuts

  1. 1 Heat the oven to 400°F (200°C) convection. Rub each beet with oil, wrap individually in foil, and roast 50–60 minutes until a knife slides through easily.
  2. 2 Cool until you can handle them, then rub the skins off with paper towels — they come away in one piece. Cut into wedges.
  3. 3 Toast the walnuts in a dry pan over medium heat for 4 minutes, shaking constantly, until fragrant and a shade darker. Tip them out immediately; the pan keeps cooking them.
  4. 4 Shake the dressing ingredients together and toss two-thirds of it through the warm beets. Leave 10 minutes.
  5. 5 Arrange the leaves on a platter, spoon the beets over, crumble the feta by hand and scatter the walnuts and dill.
  6. 6 Finish with the rest of the dressing.

Making it ahead

  • Roast the beets up to three days ahead and keep them refrigerated in their dressing. They improve.
  • Golden beets do not bleed and look striking mixed with red, if you can find it.