Warm salad of freshly cooked lentils and roasted dice of sweet potatoes finished with the nicest brown butter and sage dressing – it’s an unlikely comfort food.

Salads in winter
A salad in winter? Not a thing! Winter is for bowls of steaming food, eaten with spoons, landing in your stomach with satisfying warmth. It’s about saucy, soupy, stewy dishes that are reassuringly rich and comforting. Salads? Keep them for the summer, grrl!
But this one is an all-year round salad that is going to cheer you up and make you feel warmly happy in the bleak midwinter as well as in other seasons. In fact I should not think it’s such a good fit for a summery dish: all the brown and orange ingredients in it will not go that well with a pina colada on the beach.
Also, it’s actually a warm salad so there – I rest my case.
Which lentils are the best?
There are several varieties of these pulses, which is the family of plants lentils belong to. Red and yellow lentils (the latter also known as split peas) are popular in the Indian subcontinent cuisines, to prepare dhal and soups.
Green and brown lentils keep their shape better so they are more suited to use in salads and dishes where the texture matters. Black (beluga) lentils, as the name suggests, are the caviar of the pulse world, with a lovely, nutty flavour.
But my favourite are French puy lentils, green and speckled grey. They cook quickly, don’t require soaking and keep their lovely, tiny button shapes.
Cook your lentils from scratch
It’s a much better value all round, and in this instance there’s no excuse as they will cook easily within the time that sweet potatoes need to roast, cut in large dice and spread over a baking tray.
I appreciate buying lentils ready-cooked is a valuable shortcut when you just want to add them to a casserole or stew. But the tinned, cheap ones are not very nice, and the vacuum-packed pouches are expensive. So there, again – no excuse not to cook them at home.
They don’t need soaking, just rinsing thoroughly with cold water. Place them in a pan with three times as much water, a teaspoon of salt and simmer for about twenty minutes: until they are tender but with a hint of a bite. Drain them and keep warm, waiting for the sweet potatoes to come out of the oven.
Sweet potato and substitutes
The recipe comes from New York Times Cooking, and the author, Yossy Arefi, suggests using butternut squash or carrots as an alternative to sweet potatoes.
I have not tried those alternatives because I’m such a fan of sweet potatoes I’m not keen on substituting them with any other vegetable. And as it happens, the combo with lentils is an absolute killer here, in a good way. Especially with the – also killer – brown butter dressing.
How to make brown butter?
I never quite take it seriously when a recipe says the dressing makes the dish, but in this case it is completely true.
Brown butter is made by cooking butter gently up to the stage when the milk particles drop to the bottom of the pan and toast brown, giving it a gorgeous, nutty and toasted flavour. It is reasonably easy to make, as long as you listen to your butter.
First it foams and spits and sputters, making a lot of noise, but when it goes quiet it needs your attention, as that’s when the milk protein bits drop to the bottom and turn brown. Make sure they don’t burn by scraping them off the bottom, and in a couple of minutes the smell will tell you brown butter is ready.
Brown butter vinaigrette
That lovely butter is then is used to cook and crispen sage leaves.
With some olive oil to enhance the flavour and some red wine vinegar and maple syrup for respectively, acidity and sweetness, it’s an unbelievably potent condiment. Poured over, admittedly rather bland, lentils and sweet potatoes, it transforms them both. And the finishing touch is soft cheese crumbled over the lentils and sweet potatoes.
What type of cheese to add?
Blue cheese, goats cheese, feta, chunks of Brie or Camembert – whichever is your preference. I can even imagine crumbling some good Cheddar over, if that’s your choice. Or skip it altogether if it’s to be a vegetarian dish.
Either way, it’s a hugely satisfying, delicious salad, warming the cockles any time of the year.
More lentil recipes
Spicy, cheesy lentils bake, a superior vegetarian dish put together in 15 minutes. This is where your ready-cooked pouches of lentils will come in handy.
Lentil and mushroom bake with red peppers and a little spinach for vibrant colour. Lentils are cooked from scratch but no soaking required for this recipe.
Mejadra is a simple lentil and brown rice dish and my recipe has a great fried onions shortcut tip. Levantine rice and lentils were the biblical Esau’s ‘bowl of stew’. Probably.
More sweet potato recipes
Sweet potato tray bake with a lively topping of peppers, tomatoes, bacon and cheese. A one tray dish ready in under an hour.
Roasted sweet potatoes with chorizo and bacon are the perfect blend of sweet, salty and spicy. Served with sour cream topping for a main course, or on its own for a side.
Baked sweet potato with tahini butter and sesame seed crunch is pretty incredibly tasty. You wouldn’t have thought so, would you? Plus it’s a perfect keto fat bomb.