Fresh Carrot Cranberry Salad (Vegan) - Low-Carb, So Simple! -- gluten-free, sugar-free recipes with 5 ingredients or less (2024)

Happy New Year! It’s great to start the freshly started year with fresh flavors and colorful ingredients. For that I developed this simple and fresh accompaniment as a welcome reliefafter all the overindulgence of the holidays. This salad is easy to make, colorful, crisp and tasty.

Tips for making the Fresh Carrot Cranberry Salad

This is so simple salad to make that you really cannot fail. A couple of recommendations though: coarsely grated carrot brings better results than finely grated carrot. If the carrot is finely grated, it will release all the juices and the salad is swimming in the juice, which means that the texture is mushy rather than crunchy. The napa cabbage, though, can be finely shredded because it doesn’t release juices.

My experiments with the Fresh Carrot Cranberry Salad

I bought a bottle of 100% cold pressed sea buckthorn juice. It’s quite common here in Finland. I was developing a simple salad with grated carrot and sea buckthorn juice for my Finnish blog. I wanted to develop a similar, fresh and a bit tangy salad to this blog as well. I thought 100% sea buckthorn juice is not that easily available around the world, so I would replace it with something else. I thought different alternatives, and chose cranberries. They are also low-carb, healthy, tangy and easily available almost everywhere, especially frozen cranberries.

So, I grated some carrot and added some crushed cranberries. I thought the mixture needed something tocomplement the flavors. Something sweet and something salty. I added a pinch of salt and some drops of stevia.

Quite good, but I wanted to lighten the salad somehow. Now it was filled with intensive colors and flavors. It needed something with neutral color and mild flavor… What could that be? I was immediately thinking of napa cabbage. It’s mild and crispy — but not too crispy. The carrot brings crunchiness to this salad, so I needed something to balance that as well. After trying out napa cabbage I was convinced that it was a great addition to otherwise so powerfully colored and flavored salad. They key was to add enough napa cabbage.

Tips for variation

Below a few ideas:

• In case you can get 100% cold pressed sea buckthorn juice, you can substitute 3tablespoons sea buckthorn juicefor the cranberries. You might want to reduce the amount of sweetener, because even sea buckthorn is tangy, it’s not that acid than cranberries.
• You can also substitute lingonberries for the cranberries, but please keep in mind that lingonberries have double more carbs than cranberries.
• In case you cannot get sea buckthorn juice or cranberries, you can simply use lemon or lime juice. You can also use pulp for tiny tangy bites.
• You can replace the shredded napa cabbage with shredded white cabbage to get extra healthy and crunchy salad.
• For even more flavorful salad, you can add 3/4 cup (180 ml) chopped celery or fennel.
• Add some chili for fiery bite.