Vegetable Slaws

With their deep, rich color and earthy-sweet flavor, beets seemed like a great starting place for my testing. But unlike cabbage, which succumbs to a sharp knife with little effort, dense beets would take more elbow grease to turn them into shreds thin enough to be palatable raw. A mandoline could do the job, but I ruled it out since it’s not a tool that everyone owns. Fortunately, I found that both the shredding disk of a food processor and the large holes of a box grater made relatively quick work of the task.

We typically pretreat cabbage to remove much of its abundant water; otherwise, you’d wind up with a slaw that’s a waterlogged mess. I had hoped I could skip this step for beets, but one test confirmed that they contain enough water to cause problems. Plus, while the shreds were thin, they were still too woody for tasters. Some sort of pretreatment was a must.

Tossing a vegetable with salt and letting it sit is a common way to pull out water. I worked my way up to using 1 teaspoon of salt with the beets before I had to put on the brakes—any more and the slaw was too salty. It also took an hour, which was too long to wait. Luckily, salt wasn’t my only pretreatment option. Just as it does with fruit, sugar can extract liquid from vegetables. It isn’t as effective as salt at the task—how quickly water gets pulled to the surface is determined by how many dissolved particles are in the solution, and sugar remains one molecule when dissolved whereas salt breaks down into two ions—but the combination of the two would speed up the process. And I liked the idea of the contrast that the sweetness would provide against the tangy vinaigrette.

I tossed a new batch of shredded beets with 1 teaspoon of salt plus ¼ cup of sugar and let the mixture sit. By the time I’d finished prepping my other ingredients (which took about 15 minutes), they were sufficiently wilted; I gave them a quick spin in a salad spinner, and they were ready to go.

Now I just needed a few complementary ingredients and a dressing. I settled on endive since its bitterness would make a nice foil to the sweet beets. For another layer of texture and some floral sweetness, I added some pears. And finally, for contrasting color and another layer of flavor, I tossed in some cilantro.

As for the vinaigrette, sherry vinegar offered an oaky complexity that complemented the beets, and adding plenty of Dijon mustard punched up the flavor and lent the dressing body.

From here, it was easy to create a few variations based on the formula. I paired celery root with celery, earthy carrots with peppery radishes, and sweet kohlrabi with bitter radicchio. Changing out the pear for apple and swapping in different vinegars—rice, white wine, or cider—and alternate herbs helped give each slaw a unique profile. And with so much texture, flavor, and alluring color, these slaws were sure to appear on my dinner table throughout the year.

Keys to Success

• Thin, tender root vegetable shreds

  We use a box grater or food processor to quickly turn dense root vegetables into thin shreds. Because they are still a little too tough, we toss the shreds with salt and sugar (both draw water out of vegetables, and using the duo avoided an overly salty slaw), let them sit briefly, and then remove the water with a salad spinner.

• Mix of colors, textures, and flavors

  We start with root vegetables—such as beets, carrots, and celery root—and then add crisp, less-dense vegetables—including celery, radicchio, and endive—to lighten up the mixture while adding texture. Apple and pear add sweetness and more crunch while herbs add another layer of fresh flavor.

• Fresh, complementary dressing

  Instead of turning to a mayonnaise-based dressing, we make a light, bright, mustardy vinaigrette. Dijon not only lends punchy flavor but also gives the dressing body. Varying the vinegar for each slaw—white wine, cider, rice, or sherry vinegar—gives each dressing its own character to complement the slaw.

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