Make Roasted Carrots Take On A Whole New Realm Of Flavor — You Only Need One Addition

The orange (and sometimes purple, yellow, white, and red) root veggie is perhaps best known as a lunch box staple, served in a small baggie, often accompanied by ranch dressing. Or, you might find a few chopped carrots steamed to a bland mush, alongside peas on a disappointing dinner plate. But really, carrots are capable of so much more. While carrots aren't exactly glamorous, they can become a truly delicious vegetable dish with little bit of help. They can be sophisticated, daring even. You simply have to know how to cook them. One particularly compatible cooking style for carrots is roasting. The process of cooking carrots at a high heat in your oven can help to caramelize the veggie, making its already sweet-ish flavor to new heights. Roasting carrots makes them sweet, rich, and tender, and this is a great start. But it's also just that, a start. 

Why not add a little something extra to give your roasted carrots a little razzle dazzle? We're talking butter, brown butter. So, what is brown butter? Essentially, it is butter that has been cooked until its milk solids turn a golden-brown color. This browning process gives the butter a rich, nutty flavor that will perfectly complement the sweet, caramelized taste of your roasted carrots. To make, simply brown butter in a pan and add flavorings of your choice (honey, brown sugar, or maple syrup work well for a nice glaze), then coat chopped carrots in the butter sauce and roast in a pan until tender! It's really that easy, not to mention tasty. 

Adding brown butter to your roasted carrots is a simple way to amp up the dish's flavor. But this doesn't mean you can't add some flourishes of your own to this dish. For starters, you might want to add aromatic ingredients such as rosemary or dried sage, which you can sauté with your butter and then remove before coating your carrots, to give the sauce more complexity and depth. If you want to double down on the warm flavor, you can add in a bit of bourbon to your butter sauce. This will give your dish some serious body and, paired with browned butter and maple syrup or brown sugar, might just be the key to perfecting the dish.

If you're hoping to go more seasonal with your brown butter roasted carrots, they make a great side for Thanksgiving and winter holiday gatherings. Seriously, think of the excellent flavor contrast between rich, buttered carrots and sharp, bright cranberry sauce (perfectly excavated from its can a la Duff Goldman's hack, of course). But you might want to give your brown butter carrots a bit of a holiday inspired twist. You can do so by incorporating seasonal ingredients such as pecans (think pecan pie) into the dish. Simply roast pecans right alongside your carrots and serve. And speaking of cranberries, you can add dried cranberries to the dish for a bright twist on its rich base. Now, if this seems too tasty to save for the holidays, you're right. So go ahead and make a batch any old time you please.