Carrot&Burnt Orange Salad

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Ingredients

For 4 servings:

Instructions

  1. Peel and grate carrots. Use the medium sized holes for the grater. Add them to a bowl.
  2. Get the zest of the orange and add it to the bowl.
  3. Carefully peel the orange and lift the supreme off. Any orange juice left behind should be added to the bowl.
  4. Cut each supreme in half, and with a kitchen torch burn them until char marks are visible.
  5. While the supreme cool down, mince the shallot and add it to the bowl along with the juice of the quarter lime.
  6. Add the chared orange supreme to the salad. Season with salt and MSG, add a splash or two of rice vinegar to your liking and finish with a healthy drizzle of olive oil.
  7. If it's a bit too bitter, add a tiny pinch of sugar.

Bonus notes

This is the first recipe in a series of three that I made for catering a small local event, as a volunteer. It was the first time I did such a thing and it was so fun I plan to do it again!

The inspiration came from a dish I tasted at a fine dining vegetarian restaurant (Culina Hortus) where, among the myriad of components there was carrot and burnt citrus together. I knew carrot and orange go well together, but the burnt element added a bittersweet twist to it. So I developed this recipe and decided to serve it for volunteer catering.

Originally it had soy sauce as a seasoning, but I was made aware that at least one person I was feeding had celiac so I had to make some adjustments. I still did try it with soy sauce but it turned out a bit off balance, so I think using just MSG was the right call.

The reasoning behind using both orange and lime juice, and rice vinegar is that they all get their acidity from a different acid. Lime and orange contain citric acid, while vinegar is acetic acid. They provide different type of acidity, so they compliment each other.

The rest of the seasoning can be finicky to get right, so I suggest to take your time to adjust and small quantities at a time.