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Roasted Beet Salad with Oranges and Blue Cheese

Roasted beets, orange segments, blue cheese and pomegranate molasses create a delicious, unexpected salad.
Course Salad
Servings 4

Ingredients

  • 4 roasted beets, thoroughly chilled—peeled and sliced (about 2 cups—directions for roasting beets in Kitchen Notes)
  • 1 navel orange, peeled, the segments separated, then cut into thirds
  • 1 tablespoon pomegranate molasses
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon ponzu (see Kitchen Notes)
  • 3 or 4 tablespoon blue cheese, crumbled (see Kitchen Notes)
  • a good grating of black pepper

Instructions

  • Put the sliced beets and oranges into a serving bowl.
  • In a small bowl, whisk together the pomegranate molasses, olive oil and ponzu. Don’t add salt! There is plenty of sodium in the ponzu, and the blue cheese will be fairly salty too.
  • Pour the dressing over the beets and oranges and lightly stir to combine. Add the blue cheese and gently toss. Grate black pepper over everything, toss lightly and serve.

Kitchen Notes

Bundle your energy use. If we are, say, baking something, we will often be roasting something else at the same time.
Beet it. Select medium-sized beets, cut off any green tops, and wash them. Then coat with olive oil, place them in a baking dish, and roast at 375ºF. It will take about 75 to 90 minutes. The nice thing about yellow beets and red-orange beets is that they don’t stain your hands when you peel them.
Blue cheese. Select something on the dryer side that crumbles well, rather than something on the wet and sticky side. For this, we used the last of that wonderful Roaring 40s cheese from Australia. This would be good with Maytag or Stilton too; in California, I would try Point Reyes blue, and in New England, I would try Great Hill.
Ponzu? Ponzu is a very tart citrus-based Japanese sauce. It looks like pale-yellow vinegar and it is very lemony in taste. If you can’t find it, don’t substitute orange juice [as some recipes suggest]. Use lemon juice.
Interestingly the word ponzu derives from the Japanese word for vinegar, zu, and the Dutch word for both a citrus orchard and the juice of its fruit, pons—which would have passed into usage in Japan in the 18th century. When I think about the global narrative that is so much a part of our lives today, I try to remind myself that it is far from new—it is as old as humanity.