Roasted radishes with whipped feta, brown butter leeks and poppy seeds

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James Ramsden pairs his roasted radish recipe with delicious whipped feta to make a colourful spring salad. The dish makes a great side dish or starter when paired with warm pitta bread.

First published in 2017

There’s a Greek restaurant just off the Harrow Road called Tsiakkos and Charcoal which is one of my all-time favourite places to spend an evening. It’s a dingy, spit-and-sawdust sort of place – a bike leaned up against a wall, the owner sitting at his laptop messing around on iTunes, toilets you don’t want to inspect too closely…it is not Chiltern Firehouse. But it’s perfect. Mostly because of the food – kleftiko that relents at the smallest nudge from a spoon, bright and sparkling sea bream, slow burnt pork that crackles with the heat of the grill.

Best of all though is the feta salad. Instead of the miserly chunks of the stuff in your standard Greek salad, this arrives with a vast, tomb-like slab of feta dumped on top of the distracting vegetable goings-on. It’s marvelous. For a feta-loving glutton like me it’s the perfect sort of dish.

But this is Great British Chefs, and some refinement is needed. Feta goes very well indeed with radishes, and given a) this is a series about pairing ingredients and b) spring = radishes, it seemed like a good thing to do. I’m particularly into roasting radishes at the moment, so that’s what I’ve done here.

Serve as a side dish or a starter with warm pitta bread.

Ingredients

Metric

Imperial

Roasted radishes

Brown butter leeks

Whipped feta

To serve

  • 2 tsp olive oil
  • poppy seeds

Method

1
Preheat the oven to 220°C/gas mark 7
2
To prepare the leeks, melt the butter in a frying pan and allow to go brown over a medium heat. Add the leeks, thyme, and a pinch of salt and pepper. Cook until soft
3
To make the whipped feta, place the feta, garlic, yogurt, olive oil and lemon juice in a food processor and whiz until smooth
4
Halve the radishes and toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper. Roast for 10 minutes until tender but still retaining some crunch
5
Serve the whipped feta with the radishes and leeks. Garnish with radish leaves, a scattering of poppy seeds and a little olive oil, and serve
First published in 2017

James Ramsden is author of four cookbooks, he has written about food and cooking for Delicious magazine, the Guardian, the Times, the London Evening Standard and many others.

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