This Grilled Halloumi and Beet salad makes a great main course for a light summer meal, or as an appetizer for a dinner party. It’s the perfect combination of earthy, sweet, sour, and salty, and uses the best of summer produce. Also, grilled cheese on a salad. Need I say more?
If you’re not familiar, halloumi is a Greek cheese that has a mild and salty flavor and a firm, almost squeaky texture. The magic is that holds up to being grilled, so that it gets warm and charred with pretty grill marks, but doesn’t melt into a gooey mess. This makes it perfect for a salad like this one, or another grilled salad like our grilled Romaine, or even just as a slice-able appetizer to your main course.
If you can’t find it or don’t have time to grill halloumi, your favorite mild or creamy cheese will work well here: Fresh mozzarella, goat cheese, labneh, etc. Best not to grill those, though, as they’ll melt into nothing.
I love beets, as discussed at length in our post on Beet Tartare. Jon and I had a very similar dish to this one at our wedding dinner at Forage in Cambridge, MA. Roasted beets and cheese go really well together! This dish can be made with orange beets as well, which are milder in flavor. If you feel like adding even more color to this vibrant salad, use both red and orange beets.
Not only did Jon and I enjoy a similar salad at our wedding, but we also were inspired by a dish served at Field and Vine, a restaurant in Somerville, MA, shortly before we moved to Chicago. Basically this dish carries a fair amount of memories and nostalgia of summer and our favorite places to eat in Boston. It also carries, and I can’t stress this enough, a brick of grilled cheese. We hope you like this recipe as much as we do!
This recipe serves two people as a main course, but you can easily split this into four smaller appetizer portions. It would pair really well as an appetizer for our grilled tandoori chicken skewers!
- 3 medium beets stems and root removed
- 8 oz Halloumi cheese cut into ¼-½ inch thick slabs
- 2 blood oranges
- 1 bunch fresh mint leaves chopped
- Olive oil for drizzling
- Salt and pepper
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Wrap beets individually in foil and place on baking sheet. Roast in oven for 1 hr at 400°F until pierced with fork tender throughout. Let cool. This can be done a day ahead, and the roasted beets can be stored in the refrigerator until ready to use.
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Unwrap the beets from the foil, and rub off the peels with your hands. After roasting and cooling, the peels should come off very easily. Wear plastic gloves or wash your hands after this step.
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Cut off peels from the oranges and slice into wedges.
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Preheat grill pan on the burner or prep the outdoor grill with medium heat coals.
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Brush halloumi with oil, and grill for 1-2 minutes a side, or until it releases from the grill, rotating to get the crossed grill marks.
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Assemble salad and dress with olive oil, salt, and pepper.