Roasted Broccoli Salad with Green Goddess Dressing
After spending the winter roasting every vegetable I could get my hands on, the idea of putting roast broccoli into a salad seemed like a natural progression, not to mention a great way to increase the variety of vegetables in our summer salads!
For a while I thought I’d cleverly invented this idea of putting different roasted vegetables in summer salads, but on scrolling back through Swoon Food’s recipes it seems I wasn’t quite as original as I’d thought. Way back at the start I posted this baby beetroot salad, followed by this maple roasted kumara salad, and more recently this spice roasted cauliflower salad.
Nevertheless, this roasted broccoli salad is rather special because it’s packed full of so many different greens making it super high in antioxidants and phytonutrients. It’s extremely versatile and adaptable to whatever fresh greens you have in season, and the accompanying green goddess dressing is absolutely dreamy.
While this roast broccoli salad has 3 core elements: sumac roasted broccoli, fresh greens and the green goddess dressing, it’s slowly changed over the summer to include whatever greens are available each week. At the beginning of summer it was asparagus, rocket and radish, then when asparagus went it was replaced with watercress and cucumber, and more recently snow peas, green capsicum and celery.
Thus the recipe below is more of a guide, from which you can adapt to include any fresh greens you have in season.
The green goddess dressing is essentially a lemon tahini dressing packed full of fresh green herbs such as coriander, parsley and mint and is whipped up in seconds in a blender.
So even though this roast broccoli salad with green goddess dressing is not a revolutionary new salad idea, I hope this recipe will bring you some fun new salad inspiration and may it serve you as the seasons change too. Enjoy!
Roasted Broccoli Salad with Green Goddess Dressing
Serves: 6
Prep time: 30 minutes Cooking time: 20-30 minutes
1 head of broccoli
4 handfuls of watercress or wild rocket
1 green capsicum
1 large handful snow peas
4 stalks of celery
1 Tbsp sumac
Himalayan pink salt & freshly ground black pepper
2 Tbsp avocado, coconut or macadamia nut oil (for roasting)
Green Tahini Dressing
6 Tbsp tahini
2 Tbsp freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 handfuls fresh herbs such as parsley, coriander, mint or basil
4 Tbsp filtered water
Himalayan pink salt & freshly ground black pepper
To roast the broccoli, preheat oven to 180ºC and line an oven tray. Rinse the broccoli under cold water, shake off excess water and chop into bite sized florets. Place the florets onto the lined oven tray, sprinkle with oil followed by sumac, salt and pepper. Place the tray in the centre of the oven and roast for approximately 20 to 30 minutes. The broccoli is done when you can easily slice the stalks with a blunt knife and the heads are just starting to colour. Remove the broccoli from the oven and allow to cool while preparing the dressing.
To make the green goddess dressing place all the ingredients into a high speed blender or good food processor, and blend on high until well combined. The consistency should be pourable, if it’s looking too thick add a little more water.
To make the salad, rinse and drain the watercress or rocket. Rinse the green capsicum and celery then finely slice, and rinse and drain the snow peas. To assemble, in a large bowl or serving plate layer up half the broccoli, watercress or rocket, capsicum, celery and snowpeas, and then do the same again with the remainder so that you have a well mixed, attractive looking salad.
Serve either drizzled with the green goddess dressing or with it in a small bowl on the side. This salad is best stored undressed in a sealed container in the fridge for up to 3 days and the dressing will keep up to 5 days in a sealed container in the fridge.
