Parsley and Sage Glazed Carrots are a dinnertime staple that pair well with a variety of main meals-from meatloaf to roasted turkey! Enjoy this herby version that takes this classic staple to the next level. 

THE INGREDIENTS: 

Carrots: This ingredient is probably a little obvious! Although we like to use whole carrots in this recipe, feel free to use baby carrots if that is what you have. That takes peeling and cutting (except the herbs) out of this recipe, after all! Unfortunately, matchstick carrots are too small of a cut for this recipe.

Now, you might usually have orange carrots on hand. However, can you still make this recipe if you have rainbow carrots? The answer is yes, you can! Although rainbow carrots have starkly different colors, their flavors aren’t starkly different! Instead of trying to give our interpretation of the flavor of each color, we recommend trying them for yourself! After all, you know what you like best. If you like an orange carrot, chances are you will probably like all the other colors too! Since some colors can be less sweet than an orange carrot, feel free to add a little extra sugar and butter to make up it. 

Fresh Parsley: It is incredibly important to use fresh parsley in this recipe. Dried parsley is basically flavorless, meaning that you won’t get that herby note of parsley you were hoping for! Feel free to use dried parsley for color, but just be aware it won’t add flavor. We like to use 1/4 cup of fresh parsley in this recipe. In our opinion, the flavor is apparent, however, feel free to increase it if you want more! We do not recommend decreasing the amount of fresh parsley in this recipe. It easily gets overtaken by the sweet yet strong brown sugar or the sage. 

Fresh Sage: Although dried sage can still be flavorful, we do not encourage it if you can get fresh sage. The freshness just lends itself so well to this recipe! With that being said, using what you have on hand is never a bad thing. We like to add 3 tablespoons of fresh sage to this recipe.  Please know that 3 tablespoons of fresh sage equals 1 tablespoon of dried sage. The general rule of thumb is that you take the amount of fresh herbs you wanted to use and divide it by three! Now you’ve calculated how much dried herbs to put in!

With that being said, you can either increase this or decrease this to your preference. If you do increase the sage, we recommend increasing the amount of parsley as well. Parsley is weaker than sage, after all! You can also decrease the sage to 2 tablespoons (aka 2 teaspoons of dried sage) if you so desire.

Brown Sugar: Brown sugar is what actually glazes our Parsley and Sage Glazed Carrots! What we get is almost reminiscent of caramel, in our opinion. Caramel is made by boiling water and sugar and then adding in dairy such as cream before finishing it off with a nice dollop of butter. However, we don’t actually want to make caramel! That would be a little too crazy on our carrots. So, we just use butter and do not have any need to boil the sugar in water.

We strive to not be wasteful, so we did not want to overdo it on our sugar and butter. If we made too much sauce to cover the carrots, that would be quite a bit of waste! This is to say that we ask you to not decrease the sugar in this recipe. We have already taken into account the minimum amount. These carrots are sweet and the brown sugar is easily present. Whenever we have tried this with less sugar it just is noticeably not as sweet. With less sugar, the carrots are also not as covered as you would hope for.

If you want to have more of that deep brown color on your carrots, there are two secrets. One of them is to increase the amount of brown sugar! We recommend increasing it by no more than another ¼ cup. Try to stick to the ¼ to ½ cup of brown sugar range. For what kind of sugar, use light or dark-whichever you have on hand.  We usually have light brown sugar and it works wonderfully in this recipe, and dark brown sugar would make it all the sweeter! 

Olive Oil: Olive oil allows us to roast our carrots in this recipe. If you aren’t one to use parchment paper, olive oil greases your pan and allows the veggies to not stick and make a mess on your baking sheet! However, oil does a bit more than we think. As one thekitchn article states, oil helps enrich the flavor as well!

With that being said, this is such a particular issue that if you are purposefully interested in reducing the fat in this recipe, you could try roasting the vegetables in no olive oil-just make sure to use some parchment paper! Then, if you like it that way, there is no problem at all with taking the oil out of this recipe!

There is no need to increase the amount of oil in this recipe. In terms of olive oil itself, replace it with any sort of fat: from vegetable oil to some melted butter.

Butter: Butter is honestly just as important as the brown sugar when it comes to these Parsley and Sage Glazed Carrots! If you have too much brown sugar and not enough butter, you form a thick paste that does not coat the carrots well. If you have too much butter per the amount of brown sugar, you won’t get that dark, caramelized appearance on your carrots. So, the brown sugar will not stick as well. It can also be too greasy! Please only change the amount of butter in this recipe if you are also altering the amount of brown sugar. Always maintain the 1 tbsp of butter per ¼ cup of brown sugar ratio.

We don’t recommend replacing this part of the recipe with oil, as it does not lead to as successful of a coating. You can use either unsalted or salted butter in this recipe. If you do use salted butter, you can consider reducing the amount of salt in this recipe by just a pinch if you want to ensure the carrots are not too salty! We like to use unsalted butter in all of our recipes, from savory to sweet.

Salt: Although we are going for a sweet side dish, that does not mean we should skip the salt! Salt is helpful in that it actually brings out the sweet flavor of something and just gives it an overall, finished flavor. That is why you often see things such as cookies with sea salt sprinkled on top. Feel free to adjust this amount of salt to your preference! 

Black Pepper: Freshly cracked or the pre-ground form, just use whatever you have on hand! Black pepper brings our taste buds back and reminds us we are eating a savory dish, after all. It goes well with the brown sugar coating instead of working against it. We do not use a heavy amount in this recipe on purpose, so it is not overwhelming. Still, adjust it to your preference! 

Garlic Powder: Garlic just goes with so many things, and this Parsley and Sage Glazed Carrots recipe is no exception. Although we use garlic powder in this recipe to ensure a more even coating before roasting the carrots, you can also replace this garlic powder with fresh garlic. Use two garlic cloves and mince them. Once the carrots are done roasting, add them, the butter, and the garlic in the pan and cook until the garlic is fragrant, roughly 30 seconds to a minute. Then, add the brown sugar and continue with this recipe as stated. This recipe is actually light on the garlic to keep it as a background flavor, but feel free to increase it or even get rid of it entirely if that is what you want! 

KEY INFORMATION: 

Why Use a Baking Sheet AND a Pan For This Recipe? If you use only a baking sheet in this recipe, you are not able to achieve that tasty, darkened glaze over the carrots. Whenever we have spread a butter and brown sugar mixture on top, even when we later spoon what moved onto the baking sheet on top of the carrots again, that glaze is just not achieved and the carrots are not as flavorful as they could be. It is also harder to add fresh herbs to this recipe when it is entirely baked, in our opinion.

However, we also did not like it when we only used a pan. The carrots take much longer to cook and don’t evenly cook through as well as if we were to just roast the whole thing. Therefore, the baking sheet is to cook the carrots thoroughly and quickly. The pan is to achieve the glaze and allow for easy coating of the herbs. 

How do I Ensure I Cut the Carrots Correctly? In our Parsley and Sage Glazed Carrots recipe, we state that the carrots should not be overly thick and that they are around 2 inches long. Now, you probably don’t want to pull out a ruler! What we find to be a good substitute to see if we are on track for cutting our carrots is to use our pinky finger. If the carrot is longer than our pinky finger, we will want to shorten the carrot. The more you cook, you will naturally get used to what is a wider carrot than average. It’s better for the carrots in this recipe to be a bit thinner than a bit too wide, so feel free to cut your carrot in half lengthwise more than once if you are feeling uncertain! 

The Secret To a Dark Brown Glaze: When you first add the brown sugar, butter, and carrots to the pan, you’ll be able to tell that they are well coated after just a minute or two. If you really wanted, you could even serve the carrots right then and there! However, we like our carrots to get dark brown, a result of the sugar caramelizing onto the carrots themselves. This happens because of two reasons: heat and patience! Our first secret to a dark brown glaze, as we mentioned in the Ingredients section, was just adding more brown sugar. The more sugar, the more that can caramelize! However, you don’t need to do that.

By the end of 10 minutes on medium high heat, your carrots will have had ample time to darken and look restaurant quality. Just 10 (or maybe 15 depending on how hot your stove is) minutes of patience is the key to this recipe! However, make sure to stir semi-frequently so that nothing burns and each carrot has a chance to get some caramelizing time on the pan. 

Can I Make This Recipe with Dried Herbs? Yes and no. In terms of flavor, dried parsley does not do fresh parsley justice and is quite flavorless. However, dried sage is actually alright in the flavor department! In terms of presentation, both dried parsley and dried sage will still give a nice appearance to your carrots. If it is what you have on hand, feel free, but just know it will turn out more like “Sage Glazed Carrots”. Replace the fresh parsley with 4 tsp dried parsley and the fresh sage with 3 tsp (AKA 1 tbsp) dried sage. 

Can I Make This Recipe Without the Herbs? YES! Even without herbs, this recipe is a great glazed carrot recipe. The herbs are a plus, but not mandatory for a delicious, crowd-pleasing side dish. 

What Goes With Parsley and Sage Glazed Carrots? It overjoys us that you asked! We are tempted to say “everything”, but we will give a few examples that are a bit more concrete. Meatloaf and mashed potatoes are a glazed carrot’s best friend. Feel free to also pair it at the BBQ with barbecued meats or double down on the veggie side dishes and pair it with a vegetable simply cooked in butter, salt, and pepper or even a nice broccoli rice casserole. Blackened fish with rice would also benefit from this sweet side dish to help with the heat or smokiness! For our vegetarians, feel free to bake some homemade bread and cook up some cannellini beans with some leeks. Have an appetizer and side dish kinda dinner night!