Carrots are dependable. You can get them anywhere, any time of year. Sweet and earthy, there are no surprises. But it’s their stalwart nature that makes them such a good backdrop for exciting ingredients and flavors you wouldn’t usually find on the Thanksgiving table. In the case of our “Magic Carrots,” those ingredients are nutty browned butter, fragrant orange zest, earthy, tangy za’atar and sweet-tart pomegranate molasses.

Why not start with butter?

Officially, this recipe is called Butter-Roasted Carrots with Za’atar and Pomegranate Molasses, but we kick off the roasting with olive oil. Carrots take longer to cook than butter takes to brown. Using butter as the first and only cooking fat would cause the milk solid to burn. Adding it a little later ensures those solids only caramelize, giving the dish a rich, nutty fragrance and flavor.

And as Cooking School Director Rosie Gill explained on a recent episode of Milk Street TV, adding the spice blend a little later helps protect its flavor too; Much like the milk solids, the oregano and thyme in the za’atar will burn along with the butter if added too early. This two-step approach ensures you get the best possible outcome: super-sweet, meltingly tender, well seasoned carrots glazed with perfectly browned, not acrid, butter.

Think thin for even roasting

You can make this dish with the fat carrots that come in a big plastic bag, but you’ll have to do a little extra knife-work. Bunch carrots—the type sold with their greens attached—are especially good here because they’re uniformly slender and fresh. If using carrots with thick upper portions, after halving them lengthwise, halve them again to create more uniform pieces. Doing so ensures everything cooks at the same rate while increasing the surface area available for browning, so you don’t end up with a mix of burnt tips and undercooked portions.

The magic is in the details

Browned butter carrots would have been enough for me, but I’m so glad our kitchen took things a little further. These carrots aren’t just sweet and nutty; they’re sweet, nutty, earthy, salty, tangy, slightly bitter and rich. Instead salt and pepper, the carrots are seasoned with za’atar, a Middle Eastern spice blend made up of sesame seeds, sumac, salt, thyme and oregano. It’s the sumac that makes za’atar stand out among other blends—with its noticeable tang, it can work as a stand-in for lemon juice or vinegar.

For even more complexity, orange is incorporated in two ways. The zest gets tossed with the carrots along with the za’atar and butter, while the flesh gets roasted alongside the vegetable. After cooking, the juice from the caramelized fruit is used to deglaze the sheet pan—make sure to scrape up all the little browned bits—creating a buttery glaze with deep, juicy flavor.

It’s all finished with crunchy chopped pistachios and pomegranate molasses, a mouthwateringly tart and juicy mainstay of Turkish cuisine, made by boiling down fresh pomegranate juice into a thick, garnet-hued syrup. The final result is a dish of carrots that puts green bean casserole to shame—decadent and rich enough to feel special, with a bracing acidity that cuts through the heaviness of traditional Thanksgiving fare. In short: the perfect side dish.

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Claire Lower

Claire Lower is the Digital Editor for Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street, with over a decade of experience as a food writer and recipe developer. Claire began writing about food (and drinks) during the blogging boom in the late 2000s, eventually leaving her job as a lab technician to pursue writing full-time. After freelancing for publications such as Serious Eats, Yahoo Food, xoJane and Cherry Bombe Magazine, she eventually landed at Lifehacker, where she served as the Senior Food Editor for nearly eight years. Claire lives in Portland, Oregon with a very friendly dog and very mean cat. When not in the kitchen (or at her laptop), you can find her deadlifting at the gym, fly fishing or trying to master figure drawing at her local art studio.