Fall Salad with Beets, Goat Cheese and Toasted Walnuts

Roasted beet slices turn sweet and tender at the edges, then land on peppery greens with cold goat cheese and toasted walnuts.

This fall salad with beets takes about forty minutes, and none of that time is spent peeling a hot beet.

Grab your baking sheet and let’s make it!

Why You’ll Love This Recipe

• Sliced beets are tender in 20 to 25 minutes, so there’s no foil packet and no wrestling with a beet too hot to hold.
• Six ingredients plus salt and pepper, and the vinaigrette can come straight from a bottle.
• You can do most of the work ahead, as the beets and the walnuts both keep well
• Deep magenta against white cheese does the decorating for you, which counts for a lot on a table where everything else has come out of the oven brown.
• Vegetarian, and gluten free as long as your vinaigrette checks out.

When and Who This Is For

This is the salad for the meal where everything else has gone soft and beige, and the table needs one thing that arrives cold, sharp and bright.

It also suits people who are fairly sure they don’t like beets. The vinaigrette and the goat cheese are both working against the earthiness that puts skeptics off, which is a large part of why this particular combination has held its spot on restaurant menus for so long.

Vegetarian as written. It’s gluten free too, though bottled balsamic vinaigrette is the one label worth turning over first, since what goes into it varies a lot by brand.

• 1 large beetroot (about 6 oz / 170 g), washed and trimmed
• 4 cups mixed salad greens (about 3 oz / 85 g), such as arugula, spinach or kale
• 1/2 cup crumbled goat cheese (2 oz / 60 g)
• 1/4 cup walnuts (1 oz / 30 g), chopped
• 2 tablespoons balsamic vinaigrette (30 ml), homemade or store-bought
• 1 tablespoon olive oil (15 ml), divided
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
• Optional: fresh dill or mint
• Optional: pomegranate seeds

Everything in this fall salad with beets is doing a specific job, so here’s what to look for:

Beetroot. One large beet gives you enough slices to run through four side servings without the salad tipping over into being a beet dish. Slicing it raw is what keeps this quick, since a whole beet needs closer to an hour wrapped in foil and then has to be peeled while it’s still too hot to handle comfortably.

The greens. Arugula is what I’d reach for, and an arugula beet salad is what most restaurants serve. The peppery edge gives the sweetness of the roasted beets something to push against. Spinach is softer and milder if that’s not your thing. Kale and beet salad holds up longest of the three, which makes the most sense if the bowl has to sit on a table for a while.

Goat cheese. The tang is doing real work rather than just adding creaminess. Beets read sweet and earthy, and something sharp and cold against them is the entire logic of the pairing.

Walnuts. Buy them raw and toast them yourself. Pre-toasted walnuts have usually been sitting long enough to lose the snap, and two minutes in a dry pan gets you the crunch that this salad is otherwise short on.

Balsamic vinaigrette. Bottled is fine here. The acid earns its place beyond flavor, because it’s what keeps the earthiness of the beets in check, and it’s the reason beet salads almost always arrive with a vinaigrette rather than something creamy.

1. Roast the beets.

Heat the oven to 400°F (200°C). Slice the beetroot into rounds about 1/4 inch (6 mm) thick, spread them across a baking sheet in a single layer, and drizzle with 2 teaspoons of the olive oil. Roast for 20 to 25 minutes, until a knife slides through without resistance. Give them room on the pan rather than piling them up, because slices sitting on top of each other steam instead of caramelizing, and the caramelized edge is where the sweetness comes from.

2. Toast the walnuts.

While the beets are in the oven, put the chopped walnuts into a dry pan over medium heat for 2 to 3 minutes, shaking it every so often. I go by smell rather than color here, since the color barely shifts before they’re gone. Tip them straight onto a plate once they smell nutty, because they’ll carry on cooking in a hot pan, and any warmth left in them will take the crispness out of the leaves they land on.

3. Whisk the dressing.

In a small bowl, whisk the balsamic vinaigrette (30 ml) with the remaining 1 teaspoon of olive oil, then season with salt and pepper. Taste it on a spoon before it goes anywhere near the salad. Bottled vinaigrettes swing a long way from sharp to syrupy depending on the brand, and it’s far easier to correct in the bowl than on the plate.

4. Build the salad.

Pile the greens into a wide bowl or spread them across a platter. Scatter the roasted beets over the top, then the goat cheese, then the walnuts. Add the dill or mint if you’re using them, and finish with pomegranate seeds.

5. Dress it just before it’s eaten.

Drizzle the vinaigrette over everything at the last moment. You can toss it gently from here, which coats every leaf, or leave it and let people help themselves. It’s worth knowing the difference: roasted beets bleed, so a tossed bowl goes uniformly pink within a minute or two. If you want it to look on the table the way it looks coming out of the kitchen, leave it untossed and let everyone toss their own plate.

Tips and Variations

Oil the hand holding the beet, not the one holding the knife. Rub about half a teaspoon of oil into that hand before you start and it rinses clean afterward instead of staying pink for a day. A light coat of oil on the cutting board does the same job for the board.

Rinse beet stains in cold water. Hot water sets the color into a board or a dish towel, so go cold first and it lifts far more easily.

Peel it if earthiness is the problem. That “tastes like dirt” reaction comes from a compound called geosmin, and beet peel carries around six times as much of it as the flesh does. Peeling before you slice takes most of it off the table.

Golden or Chioggia beets make a gentler autumn beet salad. Both are milder than red beets, and Chioggia slices open with pink and white rings. This changes the whole look of the bowl though, so keep it in mind.

Add a second roasted vegetable. Cubed butternut squash or sweet potato goes onto the same sheet at the same temperature and turns this into a heartier fall bowl. Give them about a ten minute head start, since cubes take longer than thin slices.

Make it dinner. Sliced grilled chicken, a fillet of salmon, or a cup of cooked lentils takes this from a side to a meal.

Swap the cheese. Feta brings more salt and less creaminess, and it holds its shape instead of smearing into the leaves.

Ways to Serve It

• On a wide platter rather than a deep bowl, so the beets stay visible instead of sinking.
• With the vinaigrette in a jar alongside if you’re driving this to a potluck, so nothing has gone limp by the time you arrive.
• Alongside a roast on a fall table, where the vinegar cuts through everything richer sitting next to it.
• As a starter in shallow bowls with bread and butter, before something heavy.
• Packed for lunch with the components in separate containers and put together at your desk.

• Fall Harvest Salad Recipe with Pears and Walnuts for the no-oven version of a fall salad, built on pears and blue cheese instead.

• Easy Holiday Turkey with Garlic, Lemon and Rosemary to put this next to on the big day.

• Soft Pumpkin Cookies with Chocolate Chips to finish the same meal.

Make It This Week

There’s a stretch every autumn where every meal starts to look the same shade of brown, and this is the thing I put on the table to break it up. Beets are cheap through the whole season, they last for weeks in the fridge, and one of them turns into something that looks as far more effort than it took. Pin this fall beet salad recipe now so it’s there the week you need something bright next to a roast. 🍂