Ask the Williams-Sonoma Test Kitchen: What’s Your Favorite Use for the Spiralizer?

One of our strategies for starting the new year off on a healthy foot is to eat more vegetables, an easy feat if you’re the owner of a fruit and vegetable spiralizer. A spiralizer makes it easy to replace any of your favorite Italian pastas with spiralized vegetables, which opens up the door to endless opportunities for serving fresh produce.

 

The most obvious way to use a spiralizer is to create noodle-shaped vegetables and substitute them for pasta in traditional Italian dishes like spaghetti and meatballs. But there’s so much more that you can do with a spiralizer beyond plopping some marinara sauce on a bed of zoodles. To help you think outside of the box, we asked our test kitchen cooks to share their favorite ways to use a spiralizer.

 

“I love our Zucchini Noodle Faux Pho because it tastes exactly like the real thing,” says test kitchen cook Amanda Frederickson. “Rice noodles are swapped for zucchini noodles, adding more vitamins and nutrients. The pho broth is delicious and hearty with flavors of ginger and the star anise. Whenever I need a healthy reboot, this is one of my go-to recipes.” Watch her video, below, for a play-by-play on how our pho broth is made.

 

Williams-Sonoma’s Director of Culinary, Amanda Haas, takes another approach. “I love making the beet ‘pasta’ from The Spiralizer Cookbook. The spirals are tossed with sauteed beet greens, walnuts and goat cheese,” says Amanda Haas, our director of culinary. “It’s so fun to make, and the texture of the beets transforms when they’re spiralized and barely roasted.” (You can find the detailed recipe on page 31 of our cookbook.)

In addition to the beet pasta, she also loves raw salads that utilize an array of different vegetables in noodle shapes, like this crunchy, raw Beet, Fennel and Carrot Salad.

Emily McFarren, another cook in the test kitchen, enjoys using the spiralizer to make the filling for spring rolls, like the ones featured in The Spiralizer 2.0 Cookbook. “Spring rolls are super light and refreshing for a snack—or you can turn them into a healthy meal by adding shrimp and avocado. Plus, they look really impressive, but they’re easy to put together.” She recommends serving them with a peanut sauce.

 

Tell us: What’s your favorite way to use your spiralizer?