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Now here’s a salad for the fall!
Cheerful and bright golden beets, roasted and then simmered with red onions in a sweet and sour orange glaze, tossed with garnet pomegranate arils and served on a bed of arugula and lettuce greens.
This recipe is adapted from one I received from a neighbor years ago, a recipe she had pulled from an old issue of Sunset magazine.
The original recipe was a bit fussier, and used regular beets. I think golden beets provide a much better contrast to the ruby red pomegranate arils, don’t you?
Another benefit of golden beets is that they don’t bleed red all over everything, yet they taste pretty much the same as a red beet.
Pomegranates come into season in the fall; you should be able to find them in the Northern Hemisphere from October through December. We have a wonderfully productive pomegranate tree that usually starts giving us fruit at the end of October.
Don’t know how to open a pomegranate? Check out our instructions, How to Cut and De-Seed a Pomegranate. It’s easy!
Golden Beet and Pomegranate Salad Recipe
If you want to boil the beets instead of roasting them, put the beets in a small saucepan. Cover with water. Bring to a boil and simmer for 45 minutes or until tender.
Ingredients
- 3 golden beets (about 1 pound)
- 1 cup diced red onion
- 1/4 cup red wine vinegar
- 1/4 cup water
- 1/4 cup orange juice ( can sub with 3 Tbsp Triple Sec)
- 1 tablespoon sugar
- 1 teaspoon orange zest
- 1 cup pomegranate seeds
- 1 teaspoon extra virgin olive oil for the salad, plus 1/2 teaspoon more for roasting the beets
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1/8 teaspoon black or white pepper
- 2 cups arugula and/or butter lettuce leaves
- 1/4 cup crumbled feta cheese
Method
1 Roast the beets: Rub the beets with a little olive oil, wrap them together in foil, place them in a roasting pan, and roast them at 400°F for an hour or until tender when poked with the tines of a fork.
Remove from oven. Remove the peels from the beets. Dice the beets into bite-sized pieces.
2 Make the glaze: Put the diced cooked beets, onions, vinegar, water, orange juice, orange zest, sugar, salt, and pepper, in a skillet on high heat.
Heat the mixture to a boil, and continue to boil, stirring often, until the liquid is reduced to a glaze, about 2 tablespoons (5 minutes or so). Remove from heat and let cool to room temperature.
3 Assemble the salad: Stir pomegranate seeds and olive oil into the beet mixture and add more salt and pepper to taste.
Serve on top of salad greens and sprinkle with feta cheese.
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Elise Bauer is the founder of Simply Recipes. Elise launched Simply Recipes in 2003 as a way to keep track of her family's recipes, and along the way grew it into one of the most popular cooking websites in the world. Elise is dedicated to helping home cooks be successful in the kitchen. Elise is a graduate of Stanford University, and lives in Sacramento, California.
Golden Beet and Pomegranate Salad
This looks delish! Beets around here seem to vary in size…about how many ounces of the cooked beets did you use? And when you roast them, do you add any oil, cover in foil, etc, or just remove the greens and toss them on a tray? Thank you!
Hi MG, all good questions! I used about a pound of raw beets. To roast them, I rubbed them with olive oil, wrapped them together in foil, put them in a roasting pan, and roasted in a 400°F oven for an hour, or as long as it took for the beets to cook through. I updated the recipe to reflect these points. Thank you!
Love anything Moroccan
I doubled this recipe for a potluck Christmas party I just attended the other night. There was maybe a leaf or two of arugula left, and rave reviews all around. Trader Joe’s is a good place to get pomegranate seeds and arugula, and Raley’s/Nob Hill usually carries golden beets in their organic grocery section and they have “live” butter lettuce with roots attached. For those who requested the recipe, I simply pointed them to your website, adding (and it’s true) that I have never been disappointed with any of your entries. I have decided that this golden beet salad will grace my Christmas table, especially since one of my granddaughters loves beets!
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This was a revelation! I have tried very hard to incorporate beets into my diet, and this is the first time I truly like them! I used regular beets since I could not find any golden ones. I also added one whole garlic clove to the boiling water when I cooked my beets. It turned out great!
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Any substitution for the liquer or Triple Sec? Orange juice perhaps? I’m always interested in a unique and different dish like this one. Thank you for posting it.
HI Guinie, I usually use orange juice so have updated the recipe to reflect that.