Farro, Roasted Carrots, Yogurt!

(Or feta.) Plus a spicy carrot cumin dressing. Lucky you!

BACK WHEN FARRO REPLACED QUINOA in the category of Hot New Grain That Man Has Been Consuming, Quite Literally, for Thousands of Years But That Chefs and Food Writers Seem to Believe They Discovered—I decided it was just hipster barley. Since I am a giant nerd, I pointedly avoided jumping on the Farro Train.

Plus, I felt like barley had already had ample opportunity to wow me but never really stepped up, its well-known complementary relationship to beef and mushrooms and its reputation as a powerful nutrition-delivery system notwithstanding. Barley is perfectly nice, but I saw no reason to give its grass-family sidekick space in my life.

But once I got to know farro better (by eating it), I felt like it was more suited to my personal culinary concerns than barley. It’s nuttier, chewier, and it’s less slippery than barley when cooked—while still being packed with fiber, protein, vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

So I relegated barley to soups I can take or leave and elevated farro to a grain I want to eat big piles of, flecked with treats and tartly dressed—meaning, of course, I love it in salads.

Plus, it has a faint, lovely cinnamon flavor that I just love, and which the recipe I have today plays up.

I didn’t want to use chicken stock to cook my farro; it seemed unnecessarily heavy. And I didn’t want to use plain water, because a grain salad needs its flavor layers. I unearthed a method that the New York Times’s Melissa Clark uses, from a NYC-chef-famous farro salad: you cook it in apple juice. Which, of course, goes beautifully with carrots and the cinnamon element.

And I thought about combining uncooked carrots with the roasted in this salad— I love and wanted the flavor of cooked and fresh, which are quite different. But once I caught wind of a tonic and zippy carrot-juice dressing from the fast-salad company Sweetgreen (which has been around since 2007 but which, because of my nerd thing, I just found out about this year, thanks to my young novelist friend Grant Ginder, who appears to eat there 3 times a day) I knew it was the right dressing for this particular salad; I adapted it a bit, including adding a whisper of cumin.

By the way, PSA: One of the reasons I love Sweetgreen (aside from the fact that they make reliably fresh and delicious salads, unlike another fast-salad place that once served me a salad with a block of still-frozen shrimp in the middle) is that they share their dressing recipes, like this seriously delicious spicy cashew elixir.