The Dish:
Slow Roasted Carrot Salad, Lentils, Medjool Date, Lardo & Foraged Leaves & Flowers
The Time and Place:
October 22nd, 2010, Dinner at SPQR
The Description:
I have two, dominant childhood memories of carrots. The first is of seeing my dad snack on, what I thought to be, tasteless baby carrots almost every day, and never understanding how someone could stomach them without first applying an ample coating of blue cheese dressing. The second is of eating all of the cold, dry, sliced carrots out of my salad before touching anything else so that they couldn’t ruin the rest of it – a sort of “save the best for last” strategy. Therefore, it’s easy to understand why my associated feelings towards carrots have not all been strictly positive.
While my opinion of carrots has slowly changed with age (and exposure to flavorful varieties that put supermarket carrots to shame), it wasn’t until a recent meal at SPQR that I realized just how luscious and truly delectable a simple carrot can be. After countless meals at this restaurant and plenty of memorable dishes, SPQR’s Slow Roasted Carrot Salad with Lentils, Medjool Date, Lardo, and Foraged Leaves & Flowers ($14) now ranks as one of my all-time favorites.
First, defining this dish as a “salad” may be a bit of a stretch for the average consumer. Sure there may be a few leaves and flowers, but a variety of mid-sized carrots (yellow Kinbi, Belgian white, rose, orange, or Chantenay) make up the meat of this dish. These carrots are served atop portions of carrot puree, lentils, and dots of date puree, which together create something far from your ordinary salad.
While the idea of a roasted carrot may seem painfully simplistic to most, Chef Accarrino uses numerous techniques to bring out the different facets and flavors of the carrot, changing it from something mundane into a show-stopping appetizer. For example, to prepare the whole, mid-sized carrots used as the dish’s centerpiece, they are first slow-roasted, then caramelized on the stove with butter, a mixture of herbs, and wildflower honey. The result? Sweet, tender, moist carrots so rich it’s almost uncanny.
And that’s just part of the process; there are multiple steps (which I won’t detail here) that follow in order to create the carrot puree, the thinly-sliced, cold-pickled carrots, the date puree, the house-made lardo, and finally, the lentils. These time-consuming processes, happening behind the scenes, are the reason this dish is a wonderful representation of balance and ingenuity: the carrot’s natural sweetness is complimented by the sweetness of the date purée, but countered by the acerbic quality of the pickled elements; the richness and texture of the slow-roasted carrot is mirrored by that of the lentils, while the crunchy texture and fresh, herbaceous flavors of the pickled ingredients, the carrot tops, and the foraged leaves and flowers counterbalance these elements; finally the combination of both hot and cold elements provides yet another layer of sensory balance.
The carrot’s full spectrum of flavor is thus represented in a single dish – a dish that’s not only high-minded, but also down-right delicious.
SPQR
1911 Fillmore St
(between Bush St & Pine St)
San Francisco, CA 94115
(415) 771-7779 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (415) 771-7779 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
http://www.spqrsf.com
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