Sweet potato salad

Preheat the oven to gas mark 6, 400°F/180°C fan (or 200°C conventional). Place the peeled and cubed sweet potatoes and sliced red onion onto a baking tray and toss with olive oil. Bake for 20 minutes until tender, then remove from the oven and leave to cool.

Combine the roasted sweet potatoes and red onion in a large bowl with the tahini dressing, crumbled feta, arugula, and dried cranberries. Season with salt and black pepper to taste.

Serve the salad straight away and drizzle any remaining tahini dressing on top.

Tips & tricks

For the sweet potatoes, you’ll want to ensure they’re roughly cubed into similar size shapes. This helps to make sure that the sweet potato cooks evenly and at the same pace in the oven. In the recipe above we’ve recommended that you wait to mix up the salad and let the sweet potato cool down once you’ve removed it from the oven. This is to stop the arugula wilting when you add it to the salad, but if you wanted to switch this ingredient out and make a kale sweet potato salad, you could serve it warm with sautéed kale instead. If you prefer to make the entire recipe from scratch, then you can make a tahini dressing at home easily enough. Tahini can also be sourced from any well-stocked grocery store if you’d like to save time on this step. For any leftover sweet potatoes, or for more inspiration during the fall, try cooking everything from sweet potato crisps to vegan Thai curry, to make the most of this spud whilst it’s in season.

Storage

You can store any salad leftovers in an airtight container in the fridge for up to three days. If you’ve added the tahini dressing already, however, be aware that the salad may not keep for as long as this, as the dressing can cause the salad to become soggy. When you’re making the salad, if you know you’d like to store it for a day or two, then hold off adding the dressing to the mix until you’re ready to serve, to help it stay fresher for longer.

Recipe variations

There are lots of fun ways to spin this salad. Firstly, if you prefer a salad that’s less sweet you could make this dish with potatoes instead of sweet potatoes. Some chefs will also add a crunchy texture to the top of their sweet potato salads, using sliced almonds or even pistachios. Other fall ingredients like roasted chickpeas and pumpkin seeds would make for welcome additions to this recipe. If feta is a little too tangy for your tastebuds, then a creamy goat's cheese will pair just as well with this mix of ingredients. Finally, if tahini isn’t the one for you, then you can swap out this dressing for a simple vinaigrette if you’d like a slightly tart tasting topping.

What we love most about salads is the endless ways you can vary them. For the perfect salad, you simply need a mix of greens, vegetables, nuts, fruit, and cheese, but the varieties and flavor combinations you could choose are limitless.