Cooked beetroot salads are perfect to serve at Christmas or Christmas Eve or New Year’s as they are full of color and are super tasty as a dessert after a good menu of dishes prepared for these dates. That is why we are going to teach you this time how to make a sweet beet Christmas salad with orange, pineapple, cucumber, carrot, and of course apple, a fruit that cannot be missed on these important dates.
Ingredients to make Sweet Beet (or Cooked Beet) Christmas Salad:
For the Christmas salad:
- 4 cups of Beet or beets cooked in cubes
- 1 cup of Jicama in cubes
- 2 apples in cubes (red or green)
- 3 Oranges in cubes
- 2 cups of Pineapple in cubes
- 1 Cup of Cucumber with skin in cubes
- 1 cup of diced carrot
For the vinaigrette:
- 2 tablespoons of lemon juice
- 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar
- 1 teaspoon of orange zest
- ¼ cup of sugar (50 grams)
- Walnuts or peanuts (optional)
- Sour cream or Greek yogurt (optional)
- Condensed milk (optional)
How to make Sweet Beet (or Cooked Beet) Christmas Salad:
We put together all the ingredients for this Holiday Beet Orange Salad. If you have bought it raw and do not know how to prepare the cooked beet, we recommend that you put it in a pot with water to boil with the skin and everything, as if it were a potato, for 20 or 25 minutes so that it is soft. And once it is warm, they will remove the skin with their hands or with a potato peeler. Then they will let it cool completely and you can cut it into cubes of the size you want.
In a large bowl or salad bowl, mix the cooked beets together with the apple cubes that can be cut with or without skin, and can be both red and green or a mixture of both. Add the orange cubes. We can also use mandarin oranges, grapefruit or a mixture of all to put in this versatile beet and apple Christmas salad.
Now we are going to put the cucumber and pineapple in cubes. In fact, it is more traditional to add guava to this Christmas Eve salad, but it seemed appropriate to add a refreshing touch with cucumber and tropical pineapple. I prefer to put it with the cucumber skin to add more contrast of Christmas colors with this green and the red of the beet.
Tip: Beet salad also goes down very well as a New Year’s dessert.
Then add the jicama and diced carrots. Jicama, as you know, is almost all water and it will give a lot of texture to our Christmas beet and carrot salad. We mix perfectly all the Christmas fruit salad so that it takes on a beautiful pink color due to the cooked beets.
To make the vinaigrette, in another bowl mix the vinegar together with the lemon juice, the sugar and the orange zest. The latter will give it a very special citrus touch and the sugar together with the vinegar and lemon will give it a very tasty bittersweet touch.
Once the sugar is well dissolved, we pour the vinaigrette over the Christmas salad with beets and pineapple and integrate perfectly with the fruits. We can serve this Christmas sweet beet salad at room temperature or cold, as you prefer. At the time of serving it, we pour a handful of nuts of our preference on top to give it a crunchy touch. And if we prefer it creamy, we can add a splash of sour cream or Greek yogurt and condensed milk and we will obtain a super creamy Christmas apple salad that is perfect to enjoy as a dessert on these dates.
