Roasted Beet Salad

With Stephen Ryan

The Emerson Inn serves this beet salad as a nice harvest or fall dish, but you can make it any time you can get local or farm raised beets. It consists of roasted beets, goat cheese, red onions, mixed greens served with an herb dressing.

The herb dressing in this video is made with tarragon and sage but you can use any mixture of fresh herbs you have available. The rice wine vinegar at the Inn is fortified with the pieces and stems of all the fresh herbs the kitchen collects.

There are many ways to present the salad but the Inn likes to lay out thinly sliced pieces of the beets overlapping on the plate. You can also serve the beets and mixed greens all mixed together if you wish.

The salad is also garnished by sprinkling roasted pumpkin seeds, which are made by oiling the seeds, adding salt and pepper, and then roasting in the oven until crisp.

Ingredients

Candy stripped beets (or regular beets)
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt & Pepper to taste
Herb Dressing (see below)
Mixed Greens
Red onion, sliced thin
Goat cheese
Pumpkin seeds, roasted

For Herb Dressing:

1 shallot
1 teaspoon Dijon mustard
Juice of 1 lemon
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
Salt and Pepper to taste
Mixture of fresh herbs (suggest tarragon and sage)
¼ cup rice wine vinegar

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
1. Trim the ends of the beets, lay in a roasting pan or baking sheet, oil, season with salt and pepper, and cover with tin foil and bake in a 350 degree F. oven about 40 minutes or until tender. When cool, peel and slice thin.
2. While beets are roasting you can make the herb dressing. (see below)
3. When ready, toss mixed greens with a small amount of the Herb Dressing to coat.
4. For presentation, arrange slices of the beets around a circle, overlapping, to cover the bottom of the plate.
5. Place the mixed green salad over the beets. Cover with more of the Herb Salad dressing.
6. Place goat cheese around the edge of the plate on top of the beets and sprinkle with roasted pumpkin seeds.

Note: To roast pumpkin seeds simply oil and slow roast in the oven until crunchy.

For Herb Dressing:
1. Add all ingredients except the vinegar and whisk to break up the Dijon to mix with the other flavors.
2. Add vinegar and whisk some more, not to emulsify but to create more of a broken herb and vinegar dressing.

Recipe courtesy of Chef Steve Ryan, Emerson Inn, 2011.

A Massachusetts native, Chef Ryan started cooking professionally at age 14. He briefly attended Johnson and Wales in Providence, Rhode Island, but basically he learned how to cook in the “school of hard knocks”. He has cooked in Colorado, New York, Florida and all over New England.

In 2002 he decided to perfect his craft and went back to school at the Italian Culinary Institute for Foreigners (ICIF) in the town of Piemonte, in Italy. While in Italy, Chef Ryan experienced a new way to cook utilizing fresh herbs, local vegetables and fish right of the boat. Near the end of his Italian journey, Chef Ryan interned on the Isle of Sardinia on the Mediterranean Sea. At that point he understood that cooking is a form of art and he wanted to become an artist and considers himself to be a culinary artist of sorts today.

As a true New Englander, Chef Ryan move back to the States and settled in his hometown of Boston. Once back in Boston, he worked at The Franklyn Café, where he managed to win several awards including 2002 Zagat- Top American Eateries, 2003 Improper Bostonian “Best Issue,” 2004 Phantom Gourmet “Great Ate” Award among many others.

After a few years in Boston, Chef Ryan moved to the historic, artsy town Rockport where he joined The Emerson Inn by the Sea and its restaurant “Grand Cafe” early this summer. At Grand Cafe, Chef Ryan’s sophisticated fare is the perfect combination to the quaint atmosphere of the Emerson Inn By The Sea.