Side Dishes

Grilling season is upon us, so fire up your grill and throw on some . . . potatoes?

Yes, you heard me right: grilled potatoes! Soft and creamy on the inside, crisp and toasty on the outside with just a touch of smoky char, grilled potatoes have become my family’s favorite way to eat America’s favorite vegetable. 

For our roasted sweet potato wedges, we needed to cut the wedges wide enough so that they’d maintain their shape once they were cooked. After a quick toss with olive oil, smoked paprika, brown sugar, garlic powder, cayenne pepper, salt, and pepper and a visit to a hot 450-degree oven, the wedges were nicely browned on their exteriors and had soft, tender interiors.

Patatas panaderas, a simple yet luxurious dish of thinly sliced potatoes accented with onions and garlic and baked in white wine and plenty of olive oil, is little known outside of Spain, but it deserves a place among the iconic potato dishes of Europe. In our version, we covered the potatoes with a tight foil lid so that the potatoes could soften. We withheld the wine for the first 40 minutes of cooking to prevent its acid from interfering with the softening of the potatoes.

We used curly kale for roasting because it retained some volume and featheriness, even when cooked. After tearing the leaves into large pieces and rinsing them, we spun the leaves in a salad spinner to remove most of the excess moisture that would otherwise need to be cooked off in the oven. Massaging oil and salt into the kale directly on the baking sheet evenly seasoned all the leaves and kick-started the wilting process before cooking. Roasting the kale in a hot oven cooked it relatively quickly and encouraged browning.

Piccata sauce — that buttery, briny combination of lemon, butter and capers, silky in texture and tart in flavor — is not just for chicken or swordfish. It’s also a zesty anchor for roasted vegetables. Here, cauliflower is roasted at high heat, which concentrates the flavor, adds nuttiness and encourages caramelization, before being doused with the sauce. Chickpeas make this a fuller vegetarian meal, but leave them out if you’d rather.

This is a classic French way to cook lentils, and it’s very easy. Aromatics are sautéed and then simmered with French lentils, also known as Le Puy lentils, for 20 to 25 minutes. It is an easy side dish, redolent of a Provencal feast.

The combination of crisp broccoli, dried fruit, nuts, and creamy dressing is a picnic-salad staple, but the sweetened mayonnaise dressing tends to overwhelm the dynamic flavors and textures of the other components. We made a lush but light dressing by replacing the mayonnaise with avocado and olive oil, buzzing them in a food processor with garlic and lemon so that the flavor was clean, bright, and savory. We also added shallot and tarragon to the salad to balance out the sweet tang and rich toasty flavors of the dried fruit and nuts, respectively.

When traditional French fries are fried, water is rapidly driven out of the starch cells at the surface of the potato, leaving behind tiny cavities. It's these cavities that create a delicate, crispy crust. Since oven fries don't heat fast enough for air pockets to form, we instead coat the potatoes in a cornstarch slurry that crisps up like a deep-fried fry would.

For our roasted fennel, we began by cutting the bulbs into wedges, which had two benefits: It provided good surface area for browning, and the attached core kept the pieces intact. Covering the pieces with foil for most of the cooking time allowed them to steam and turn creamy; we then removed the foil for the last 10 minutes of roasting so that they could turn golden and deliciously caramelized. We also tossed the wedges with salted water before covering them, which provided moisture for steaming and helped get seasoning between their layers.

Roasting is a simple and quick way to produce Brussels sprouts that are well-caramelized on the outside and tender on the inside. To ensure we achieved this balance, we started out roasting the “tiny cabbages,” covered, with a little bit of water. This created a steamy environment, which cooked the vegetable through. We then removed the foil and allowed the exterior to dry out and caramelize.