Dandelion Salad with Beets, Blue Cheese, & Maple Candied Pecans

There's really nothing too complicated about this recipe, but as I mentioned above the key to getting it right (and any good loaded salad for that matter) is to focus on hitting a lot of complimentary but contrasting flavours.  If you're reading this far, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you like the idea of blue cheese and beets, but these ingredient can be a little polarizing and that's ok.  There are twists, variations, and tweaks you can make to modify this salad or to take it in an entirely different direction.

Eat your weeds!  Yes, dandelion greens are edible.  Honestly, given their unstoppable weedy nature, it's amazing that we don't eat them more often.  Large, tender, cultivated varieties can sometimes be found at specialty grocers and farmers' markets, but you can also pick your own.  Look for clean, bright green, very young leaves early in the season (spring is ideal, but shaded or cool-weather plants will sprout young leaves all season), and only pick from areas that you're confident have been free from pesticide or heavy fertilizer use.  As with any foraging, make sure you're 100% certain about the ID of any plant you're planning to eat.  There are some dandelion lookalikes out there, many of which have hairy stems and leaves.  Don't eat these.  If you're feeling especially hardcore about cultivating your weeds, you can actually 'blanch' young dandelions by covering them with an opaque pot (or something similar) when they start to sprout.  The lack of sunlight will keep the young leaves tender and much less bitter.

If you're looking for a simple store-bought alternative, swap out the dandelions for rocket/arugula, or radicchio (which would look especially lovely against the red beets).  Watercress would make a nice variation too, though its flavour leans more into the peppery side, with some bitter elements.

I love beets.  Love the colour, love the flavour, love what they can do in chocolate cake (yes, really).  But they can be a little overwhelming too, which is why this recipe specifically calls for red AND golden beets.  Golden beets tend to have a milder, less-pronounced flavour than their hand-staining red counterparts.  If you're a little on the fence about beets in general, you could used just golden beets.  If you're looking to swap beets out of the recipe altogether, I highly recommend exploring the deliciousness of roasted radishes.  They're awesome, and you could roast them with a little bit of honey if you wanted to compensate for the lack of beet-sweetness too.

If you're in a hurry and you need a good salad but you don't have time to roast veggies, try swapping out the roots for chunks of apple.  You can toss the chopped apple with a bit of the dressing or a little lemon juice to keep them from browning.

Once again, if you've made it this far it's probably safe to assume that you like blue (or bleu) cheese - but perhaps you're one of those poor souls who's married to a blue-basher.  A finicky-fromage-frowner.  Well worry not, you've got options for those who want prefer their moldy cheeses to be gor-gone-zola.

First of all, let's talk about what kind of blue cheese to use, as they're not all created equal.  I personally like to use a relatively mild, crumbly cheese sparingly so as not to overwhelm the other flavours.  Gorgonzola is a good choice.  My fellow Canadians might want to seek out Bleu Claire from Little Qualicum Cheeseworks, Jersey Blue from Golden Ears Cheesecrafters, Bleu D'Élizabeth from Fromagerie du Presbytère, or Ciel De Charlevoix from Famille Migneron for a bit of local flavour that delights the palate without being overwhelming.  If you don't mind going a little bolder, try Stilton (but I'd personally avoid the rind, which has a different and polarizing flavour).  If you're an unabashed blue-booster, you could go bold and use a cheese like Roquefort, but I personally think you risk overpowering the rest of the salad.

If you're looking to swap out the blue cheese but still want to use a cheese, the key is not to go too mild.  A sharp crumbly cheddar would be my first choice (especially alongside a little bit of added apple to compliment the flavour), but an aged gouda would work too.  You could also used shavings of very firm, umami-rich and hard Asiago, Pecorino, or Parmesan-style cheeses.  Soft goat cheeses are very popular with beets and a personal favourite of mine, but I don't think that they bring enough 'oomph' to really pop against the other flavours in the recipe, especially when used in such small quantities.

If you want to avoid dairy altogether there are a few possibilities.  Non-dairy cheeses built around soy, cashews, and other ingredients are currently going through a craft revolution, and there are some great ones out there in both blue and hard cheese (e.g. Parmesan) styles.  If you're looking for blue cheese flavour minus the dairy, there are some pretty incredible small-scale artisanal plant-based 'cheese' makers out there turning out stunning blues.  That being said, there are also plenty of unremarkable and downright awful non-dairy cheeses, so I'd suggest that you do your homework and try a few things before committing to using anything here.  If you're not looking to hunt down a plant-based cheese, nutritional yeast flakes are a great option for replicating the salty/umami punch of Parmesan.  Nutritional yeast does represent something of a size/texture problem though, as it doesn't crumble into chunks and may end up at the bottom of your salad bowl.  You can try dressing the salad first and adding the flakes so that they stick, or adding the nutritional yeast directly to your dressing.  For a more visual/textural option, try mixing nutritional yeast with just enough olive oil to make it clump together in crumbly little balls.  Disperse a few of these yeasty-bits around your salad, et voilà.