The Best Melting Carrots Recipe

The humble carrot is an oft-overlooked ingredient when it comes to preparing and cooking meals. This sweet vibrant veggie is more often than not consigned to a saucepan or steamer as an unimaginative side dish, served raw as a crudite, or used as a base for stews and casseroles, taking a back seat to other ingredients. Despite this, carrots really are a kitchen carthorse as well as being available year-round and wonderfully light on the wallet; so why shouldn't they get their moment on center stage?

This melting carrots recipe, from the kitchen of recipe developer Jennine Rye, takes you step by step through the process of making the newest viral culinary trend to create silky, showstopper carrots that might just outshine any other dish on the table. Making melt-in-the-mouth carrots involves two stages: an initial roasting time, and then a shorter period of braising the vegetables in a richly-flavored stock. While it may be a little more work than throwing sliced carrots in the steamer, the results are absolutely worth the added cooking time. So, why not take your side dish game up a notch or two and enjoy this melting carrots recipe alongside your dinners this week?

To begin this melting carrots recipe, first you will need to gather the ingredients. To start roasting the carrots, you will want plenty of carrots, olive oil, dried thyme, sea salt, and black pepper. For the second stage of cooking, you will need butter, vegetable stock, granulated garlic, maple syrup, lemon juice, and Dijon mustard. For serving the melting carrots you will additionally want a mixture of fresh dill and parsley.

Preheat the oven to 400 F.

Place the carrots into a roasting tin along with the olive oil, thyme, and salt and pepper.

Toss the ingredients together so that the carrots are well-coated.

Dot the butter around the carrots.

Roast the carrots for 30 – 40 minutes until they are tender and beginning to brown.

Whisk together the vegetable stock, garlic, maple syrup, lemon juice, and Dijon mustard and drizzle the sauce over the carrots.

Place the roasting tin back into the oven for another 8 to 10 minutes.

Sprinkle the carrots with fresh dill and parsley before serving.

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If you are particularly active in the online world, you may well have already stumbled across the concept of melted carrots. This current culinary trend is the latest in the melted vegetables series, with melted broccoli and melted cabbage having both previously enjoyed their moment in the sun. This concept likely comes from the original melted vegetable: the fondant potato. Perhaps the most elite of potato cooking techniques, this process results in the most heavenly, silky, buttery, dissolve-in-the-mouth potato experience imaginable.

Melting carrots are much the same and use a two-stage cooking process to achieve an almost impossibly soft, velvety texture. The first stage is the roasting stage; carrots are roasted in fats and seasonings at a high temperature to bring out their natural flavors and enhance caramelization, as well as cooking them. Then, a flavorful broth or stock is added to the baking pan, and the veggies are returned to the oven for a short while longer. This second stage of cooking allows the carrots to absorb the liquids that surround them, and this helps to break down the naturally fibrous root vegetable, as well as adding even more flavor. The results of this process are more than worth it: carrots with impeccable flavor and an incredibly tender and buttery texture.

This melted carrots recipe makes for a spectacular side dish, and can easily be amended depending on the ingredients you are able to source and your personal taste preferences. The simplest way to switch up this recipe is by adding some different root vegetables into the mix. Parsnips, beets, celeriac, and, of course, potatoes, are all great options that will cook well alongside the carrots and add their own unique flavors to the dish. Or, if you simply want a more colorful dish, why not buy some purple, red, yellow, or white carrots to add into the mix? As well as adding more color to your table, differently hued carrots actually have subtly different flavors, which can help to elevate your melted carrots even further.

There are also plenty of seasonings in this dish, which you can switch up depending on your preferences. The dried thyme can be replaced with dried oregano or rosemary, and the vegetable stock can be replaced with a meatier chicken stock if you prefer a deeper umami taste. Another popular choice is to lean into garlicky flavors, and if you are a fan of all things garlic, you can add a few crushed fresh cloves into the mixture, along with a further spoonful or two of butter for a sumptuous garlic butter melted carrot dish.

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