Double down on carrots with a hearty pearl couscous salad

Meat and seafood cooks double up on ingredients all the time: They poach chicken breasts in chicken stock, make a quick shrimp broth with the crustacean’s shells and use it in shrimp risotto, include beef stock as a component in beef stew. For traditional duck confit, you cook the duck legs in duck fat.

I know, because I’ve done all of the above as a way of concentrating and amping up a main ingredient’s flavor — making it taste even more like itself. But what’s the vegetable equivalent? Of course you can cook them in vegetable broth, but it is almost always an amalgam of flavors, usually from such aromatic ingredients as onions, leeks and celery, or maybe from the scraps left from prepping them and other fairly neutrally flavored vegetables. With that technique, you certainly get more flavor than if you used water, but there’s no real concentration at play.

The first time I remember hearing about cooking a vegetable in its own juice was decades ago when the method was publicized by visionary chef Alain Passard of the Michelin-three-star restaurant L’Arpège in Paris. I’ve seen it most often employed with carrots, to the extent that it’s even shown up on TikTok in recent years as a viral hack.

One of the easiest ways to do it is with a braise-and-glaze strategy: Put whole carrots into a wide pot in a single layer, pour in enough carrot juice to come halfway up the side of the vegetables, cover tightly and simmer on the stovetop until the carrots are fork tender, then uncover, turn up the heat, add a little butter, and reduce the juice to a glaze. Salt to taste, and eat some of the most carroty carrots you’ve ever tasted.

This recipe is based on that idea, but here the juice also infuses pearl couscous, spreading the carrot love around. The result is a simple pasta salad that also gets heft from white beans and baby arugula, brightness from lemon juice and zest, and crunch from pistachios. You could eat it as a main course or a side dish, and it’s particularly well-suited to cookouts, picnics and brown-bagging.

I’m sure there are some people out there who don’t appreciate carrots as much as I do, but in general I’d say their appeal is widespread. And for the diehards, the salad proves that when it comes to carrots, more is more.

• Joe Yonan is the author of “Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking” (Ten Speed Press, 2024).

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Warm Carrot, Bean and Couscous Salad

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 medium yellow onion (8 ounces), chopped

2 garlic cloves, chopped

1 cup pearl couscous

1 pound carrots, trimmed, scrubbed and cut into 1-inch-thick pieces

2 cups carrot juice*

1 teaspoon ground coriander

½ teaspoon fine salt, plus more as needed

One (15-ounce) can no-salt-added cannellini beans, drained and rinsed

2 cups (2 ounces) baby arugula

1 teaspoon finely grated lemon zest (from 1 lemon)

2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice (from 1 to 2 lemons)

½ cup roasted, unsalted pistachios, coarsely chopped

¼ cup fresh mint leaves, chopped

In a medium (4-quart) saucepan over medium-high heat, heat the oil until shimmering. Add the onion and garlic, and sauté until tender, about 4 minutes. Add the couscous and cook, stirring to coat in the oil, until lightly browned in spots, about 2 minutes. Add the carrots, carrot juice, coriander and salt, and bring to a boil.

Reduce the heat to medium-low, cover and simmer until the carrots are tender and the couscous absorbs most of the liquid (the rest will be absorbed later as it sits), about 15 minutes. Remove from the heat.

Stir in the beans, arugula, and lemon zest and juice. Taste, and season with more salt, as desired.

Divide among bowls, top with the pistachios and mint, and serve warm or at room temperature.

Servings: 4-6 (makes about 6 cups).

Substitutions: For yellow onion, use white onion. For cannellini beans, use navy beans, great Northern beans or chickpeas. For canned beans, use 1½ cups home-cooked beans. For pearl couscous, use fregola (toasted Sardinian couscous). For baby arugula, use baby kale, baby spinach or radicchio. For pistachios, use walnuts, pecans, peanuts or pumpkin seeds. For mint, use parsley, cilantro or basil.

Storage: Refrigerate for up to 4 days, preferably without the pistachios and mint.

Where to buy: Carrot juice can be found at well-stocked supermarkets and natural food stores.

Nutritional information per serving (1 cup), based on 6: 357 calories, 10 g fat, 1 g saturated fat, 56 g carbohydrates, 314 mg sodium, 0 mg cholesterol, 12 g protein, 10 g fiber, 12 g sugar.

— Joe Yonan