Glazed Carrots

Glazed carrots get a bad rap—too often, recipes for them produce limp, soggy, or unevenly cooked vegetables with a slick, saccharine coating, causing them to be tucked away and forgotten on the back of holiday buffet tables or nudged to the side with a fork and left uneaten on dinner plates. But this underdog side is brimming with potential: Excellent glazed carrots are actually easy to prepare, and when perfectly tender, enhanced with aromatics, and coated in an emulsified buttery gloss, they can and should be the star of your dinner table. 

To develop the recipe we're sharing here, our Birmingham, Alabama-based test kitchen colleague Elizabeth Mervosh glazed batch after batch of carrots with the delightful combination of brown butter, sage, chicken or vegetable stock, and apple cider for the ideal sweet and savory balance of flavors. And to (carrot) top it all off, her recipe requires a single skillet and just a handful of ingredients you probably already have in your kitchen. They’re special enough for an impressive holiday feast, but easy enough to add to your weeknight dinner rotation. Here’s how to enhance their flavor and perfect their glossy emulsion.

Creating First-Class Flavor in Glazed Carrots

We could have left this recipe at its most basic, relying on plain butter for the glaze and just salt and a little sugar to season the carrots, but why stop there? Elizabeth enhances the carrots with fall flavors for a dish you’d be proud to place front and center on your table for Thanksgiving or a dinner party. 

The first flavor boost comes from brown butter. Just a few minutes of swirling and monitoring butter in the skillet produces a rich, nutty, complex brown butter base for the dish.

With a solid savory brown butter base, just a handful of other ingredients are needed to bolster the carrots: Adding sage to the butter as it finishes browning infuses the butter with an incredible woodsy flavor, while a combination of flavorful chicken or vegetable stock and apple cider creates a balanced savory and sweet final dish. And while many glazed carrot recipes rely on either white or brown sugar for sweetness, we prefer honey here for its complex floral flavor, which pairs particularly well with the earthy sage. A final hint of vinegar once the carrots are cooked brightens and balances the sweetness of the glaze. Cider vinegar is preferable to echo the flavors of the apple cider, but any neutral, slightly sweet vinegar such as white wine or unseasoned rice vinegar will work.

How to Ensure the Carrots Cook Evenly

Because of their tapered shape, carrots are prone to uneven cooking—if you cook the vegetable until their thinner ends are tender and properly cooked, their thicker ends will remain crunchy, and if you cook them until the thicker ends are tender, it’s likely the thinner pieces will be mushy and overdone. Classic French tournée cuts (uniform, oblong, football-shaped pieces) or oblique cuts (double-angled wedge shapes) work well, but require solid knife skills to perfect and lead to food waste from trimming. We find it easier to simply cut the carrots crosswise and on a bias into thin oval discs. Cutting the carrots into uniform half-inch pieces ensures they’ll all cook at the same rate, and the oblong oval shape doesn’t require any fancy knife work, but still has an attractive presentation.

It’s also key to cook the vegetables in a relatively shallow layer, not piled up, so they can cook in the liquid evenly. The carrots should be almost completely submerged in the cooking liquid, and using a 12-inch skillet ensures this. Using a narrower, taller pot or pan would mean the carrots on the bottom would cook more quickly than those on top, upping the chances of unevenly cooked carrots.

Perfecting the Emulsion

On paper, glazing carrots seems very simple. Combine the root vegetable with a bit of butter and liquid (water or stock are the most common) in a skillet with a bit of seasoning (salt and sugar, at its most basic) then cook, stirring and swirling, until the fat from the butter and the liquid emulsifies into a thick, saucy glaze that coats the carrots with a beautiful, flavorful sheen. But creating the emulsion and ensuring it doesn't break requires a bit of know-how and attention to timing to get a smooth, rich glaze like you'd see at a good restaurant.

An emulsion is the homogeneous suspension of one medium inside another that it normally doesn't mix with—in this case, butterfat from the butter is suspended in water from the stock and cider. Emulsions need plenty of mechanical agitation to form and remain stable. With a mayonnaise or a vinaigrette, a whisk or blender provides this action, breaking fat and water up into microscopic droplets. With glazed vegetables, this mechanical action comes from two sources: shaking and stirring the pan as the ingredients cook, but more importantly, the rapid agitation from the bubbling of the liquid as it boils.

So for a properly emulsified sauce, you must adjust the heat to maintain a rapid boil as the carrots cook. If you are too shy with heat and aren’t vigorously shaking the skillet and tossing the carrots around as they cook, the emulsion won’t form, and you'll end up with a greasy, broken sauce, instead of the glossy glaze you want. At the same time, if you use too much heat and cook off too much liquid before the carrots are cooked through, it is possible to push it too far and break the sauce.

The happy medium that avoids both of these scenarios is to start cooking the mixture of carrots, butter, and liquid over medium-high heat with the skillet covered to jump start tenderizing the carrots, then reduce the heat to medium and continue boiling uncovered to thicken the glaze. At this stage of cooking, even when lowered to medium heat, the sauce will still maintain a boil, but if it doesn’t, increase the heat as needed to make sure it’s still bubbling away. Remember, you need agitation and bubbling for the emulsification to occur.

How to Fix a Broken Emulsion in the Glaze

If you find your sauce begins to break and separate into an oily mess, this probably means the water in the glaze has over-reduced and there isn’t enough liquid left in the sauce for the fat molecules to cling to. But don’t fear—if this happens, the solution is simple: Add a few additional tablespoons of water to the skillet and return it to high heat, then vigorously mix the mixture until the sauce recombines. Once the sauce has recombined, be sure to remove the skillet from the heat so you don’t over reduce the sauce again.

With this solid technique and the right combination of flavorful additions, these glazed carrots are sure to steal the show.