Roast Beetroot Salad with Feta, Rucola and Pistachios on Cumin Spiced Carrot Hummus

This roast beetroot salad recipe with feta, rucola and pistachios on cumin-spiced carrot hummus makes my twist on a classic salad that takes inspiration from the Middle East. The bed of carrot hummus adds another dimension of flavour and texture, while pistachios add crunch and are better suited to this version than walnuts. It makes a fantastic starter, salad or side.

My roasted beetroot salad recipe on cumin-spiced carrot hummus is a twist on the classic beetroot salad with feta, walnuts and rucola – or arugula, roca or rocket – and it’s one of our best beetroot recipes and one of our best Middle Eastern style dishes. I spread the salad on a layer of carrot hummus and replace the walnuts with crunchier pistachios for added texture, making it one of our best nut recipes.

My inspiration is the Middle Eastern balela salad spread on soupy chickpeas, and the Antalya version of a Turkish white bean salad, in which the salad is piled onto creamy white beans. My pumpkin beetroot salad on whipped feta with pistachios and fresh mint, roasted cauliflower on hummus, and baby corn on creamy white beans are in the same style. I can’t get enough of these dishes that are part dip, part salad, and can be served as a snack, starter or side.

And if you’re a fan of this flavour combination, try these recipes for a beetroot feta arugula salad with walnuts on butter bean puree, a pumpkin lentil salad with beetroot, goat cheese and poppy seeds, beet and carrot salad with goat cheese, arugula and radish.

Before I tell you more about this roast beetroot salad recipe with feta, rucola and pistachios on carrot hummus, I have a favour to ask. I have a favour to ask. Grantourismo is reader-supported. If you’ve cooked our recipes, please consider supporting Grantourismo by buying a handcrafted KROK, the best mortar and pestle ever or buying something on Amazon, such as these cookbooks for culinary travellers or classic cookbooks for serious cooks. 

Now let me tell you all about this roast beetroot salad recipe with feta, rucola and pistachios on carrot hummus.

Beetroot Salad Recipe with Feta, Rucola and Pistachios on Cumin Spiced Carrot Hummus

My roast beetroot salad recipe with feta, rucola and pistachios on cumin-spiced carrot hummus is a bit hard to classify. The recipe format we use forces us to categorise recipes by cuisine as well as type of meal but I’m increasingly finding that with our original recipes I’m typing in two or three types of cuisines.

Perhaps I should just be calling this kind of dish ‘fusion’? Because while the classic beet salad with arugula, feta and walnuts is Mediterranean, my choice of pistachios instead of walnuts, and the addition of a cumin-inspired carrot, tahini and chickpea dip is obviously Middle Eastern-inspired.

Although I have to say that when I dream up recipes such as roast beetroot salad recipe with feta, arugula and pistachios on carrot hummus, my initial inspiration is Australian food, and the kind of dishes that Australian chefs have been serving up for the last couple of decades or so.

Chefs of our generation, raised in multicultural Australia, grew up eating cuisines from across the world. With every Australian city boasting a Chinatown, Asian supermarkets, Mediterranean delis, Middle Eastern bakeries, and restaurants offering everything from Ethiopian to Nepalese food, it was inevitable those influences would work their way into Australian kitchens and Australian cuisine.

With shelves and pantries filled with ingredients from right around the globe, it was only natural that chefs (and home cooks) would experiment with unexpected flavour and texture combinations, and so it was in Australia that we first started to see restaurants serving up these sorts of plates.

Terence and I have been focused on cooking the traditional dishes of places for so long – both for Grantourismo and for the cookbooks that we’ve been developing – that now I’m finding myself increasingly concocting these multi-inspirational dishes. You can expect to see more of these kinds of recipes here. I’d love to know what you think.

I only have a few tips to making this roast beetroot salad recipe as it’s super easy and comes together quickly.

Tips to Making this Beetroot Salad Recipe with Feta, Rucola and Pistachios on Cumin Spiced Carrot

I only have a few tips to making this roast beetroot salad recipe with feta, rucola and pistachios on cumin-spiced carrot hummus as it’s a cinch to make and while the total time is around 70 minutes, one hour of that is the beetroots roasting.

The Cumin Spiced Carrot Hummus

Of course, this beetroot salad recipe assumes you’ve got a tub of our cumin-spiced carrot hummus in the fridge. If you haven’t, you could make that recipe (on the previous link) a day or two before you plan on making this salad, or you could roast the carrots at the same time as the beetroot.

If you chop the carrots into small pieces and put them on a separate oven tray, they’ll be cooked well-before the beetroot and you can pull them out, let them cool, and make the carrot hummus while the beetroot continues to roast.

I should mention here that while my recipe only calls for ground cumin, sometimes I’ll add some chilli flakes, which give the dip warmth. Ground Aleppo pepper would also be great. Or a little ground paprika. I sprinkle black and white sesame seeds on the dip. You could do that here too.

Roasting the Beetroots

So what about roasting the beetroots? Occasionally I spot beet, feta and arugula salad recipes that call for cans of baby beetroots. If you can’t source fresh beetroots, by all means try canned beetroots if you wish.

But if you can access fresh beetroots, roasted beets taste so much better (they’re so sweet!), they’re naturally healthier (they’re a rich source of antioxidants and nutrients), and they’re so easy to roast.

To roast beetroots, you just give them a good scrub and loosely wrap each beetroot in foil and stick them in the oven. My recipe calls for 400 g (14 oz) of whole beetroots, which is around 3-4 baby beetroots or 2-3 medium-sized beetroots, depending on the size of your beets.

The smaller the beetroots the faster they’ll roast. I’ve found that 2 medium sized beetroots take around an hour to roast until soft on 200°C (390°F) in my oven when I roast them alone. It took longer than that the other days when I was roasting carrots and sweet potatoes at the same time on separate trays.

The Salad Dressing

My roast beetroot salad recipe calls for a quality extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. I always recommend using the best quality you can afford. I find that the better quality olive oils and vinegars might be more expensive but they taste significantly better so I use less of them than I would a cheaper product.

And while I love lots of extra virgin olive oil and salad dressing on dishes such as these, you could always pull back a little. One reason I like to make dressings in mason jars or clip-top Kilner jars is that if there’s any left over you can stick it in the fridge and use it on another salad.

The Feta Cheese

As for the cheese, my beetroot salad recipe calls for Greek feta, which is the only true feta, but we can’t always get it here in Siem Reap, so I’ve found the next best thing is a salty white Danish cheese that is softer, but equally delicious. I think both textures work. And while my beetroot salad recipe calls for roughly chopping, crumbling works too.

The Pistachios

Pistachios are infinitely superior than walnuts for this salad as far as I’m concerned, and if you quickly pan-roast the raw pistachios in a dry pan for a minute (no more; and less is probably better), they’ll be super crunchy.  I use one of these adorable small fry pans, which I also love to use to do a single fried egg.

Serving the Salad

Serve the salad immediately. It will satisfy two people if you’re eating the salad as a main or with another dish, but could feed 4-6 people if you’re serving it as one of an array of dishes as part of a shared family-style meal.

Beetroot Salad Recipe with Feta, Rucola and Pistachios on Cumin Spiced Carrot

Beetroot Salad Recipe with Feta, Rucola and Pistachios on Cumin Spiced Carrot

AuthorLara Dunston

This roast beetroot salad recipe with feta, rucola and pistachios on cumin-spiced carrot hummus makes my twist on a classic salad that takes inspiration from the Middle East. The bed of carrot hummus adds another dimension of flavour and texture, while pistachios add crunch and are better suited to this version than walnuts.

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Prep Time 10 minutes mins

Cook Time 50 minutes mins

Total Time 1 hour hr

Course Salad

Cuisine Australian, Mediterranean, Middle Eastern

Servings made with recipeServings 2

Calories 1341 kcal

Ingredients

 

MetricUS Customary

 

1x2x3x

• 400 g whole beetroots - scrubbed
• 1 cup carrot hummus
• 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tbsp quality balsamic vinegar
• ½ tsp sea salt
• 100 g Greek feta or salty white cheese - sliced into chunks
• 24 rucola leaves, washed - arugula, roca, rocket leaves
• 60 g pistachios - roasted in a pan

Instructions

 

• Pre-heat your oven to 200°C (390°F).
• Loosely wrap each of the scrubbed whole beetroots in foil and roast in the oven until soft, around 40 minutes or so, until a skewer or fork easily slides into the beetroots.
• Carefully remove the foil, allow the beetroots to cool, and slice them into chunks, peeling off and discarding tough pieces of skin, if any.
• Use a large tablespoon to spread a layer of carrot hummus onto a large serving plate and drizzle on a teaspoon of extra virgin olive oil.
• Make the salad dressing with the remaining extra virgin olive oil by pouring into a small jar, adding a tablespoon of quality balsamic vinegar, and half a teaspoon of sea salt. Stir and taste and adjust seasoning to suit your palate. Set it aside.
• Assemble the salad by spreading the chunks of beetroot and feta on top of the carrot hummus, spread the rucola leaves on top of those, sprinkle on the roasted pistachios, drizzle with the dressing, and serve immediately.

Nutrition

Calories: 1341kcalCarbohydrates: 86gProtein: 32gFat: 102gSaturated Fat: 19gPolyunsaturated Fat: 17gMonounsaturated Fat: 61gCholesterol: 45mgSodium: 3228mgPotassium: 2204mgFiber: 25gSugar: 28gVitamin A: 38542IUVitamin C: 33mgCalcium: 526mgIron: 9mg

Please do let us know in the comments below if you make this roast beetroot salad recipe with feta, rucola and pistachios on carrot hummus as we’d love to hear how it turned out for you.