Easy 4 Ingredient Vegan Carrot Sauce

This vegan carrot sauce is perfect when you’re late home, need a quick sauce and no time to spend in the kitchen.

Once you’ve discovered this, you’ll use it as a 5 minute wonder whenever you need a quick and delicious sauce. And the health benefits of carrots are so extensive, they’re worth including in your weekly diet.

Well actually, I’m a fan of quick to make and delicious vegan sauces, so this is just one of my many favourite sauces. Among my top choices are homemade tomato sauce, cashew sauce and cilantro sauce.

While the cooking time is longer than 5 minutes, the hands-on time is literally just the time it takes to peel and chop, and the time it takes to blend at the end.

Finito. Hey presto. Done.

This is one of those sauces that’s so simple you can literally use it when you don’t have any time (or don’t want to spend any time!).

There’s no frying, no watching, stirring or anything.

Just boiling the ingredients together and later, blending in the food processor.

When to Serve Vegan Carrot Sauce

Vegan carrot sauce goes well with roast potatoes, rice, pasta, broccoli, vegetables, quinoa . . . and the list goes on.

You can use it instead of a gravy or in place of a vegan creamy cheese sauce or bechamel.

This beautifully colourful sauce gives a neutral, slightly sweet juicy sauce to compliment almost all flavours. It’s also great for sprucing up a dish that’s a bit too dry on its own.

I served it on my stuffed eggplant dish and they went like a dream together.

So if you have some leftovers from the night before and you need a sauce to wake it up, grab some carrot sauce and serve it on the side.

The impact of the flavour from such a simple sauce is quite incredible.

How to Make Vegan Carrot Sauce

Take 3 carrots and peel and chop them. Cut up a large slice of red pepper and a chunk of zucchini. Of course, you can change the vegetables according to what you have to hand.

Remember to keep the colour intense, so avoid adding too many green vegetables.

Chop the carrots, pepper and zucchini into chunks and place in a small pan with just enough water to cook the vegetables. If your pan is large, you may not even need to completely cover the vegetables.

You want to use just the right amount of water that will be blended to create the sauce and you won’t be throwing any of it away, so keep that in mind when adding the water.

You can always add more if necessary, so it’s better to lean toward too little rather than too much.

Add salt to the the water, a sprinkle of turmeric and some dried herbs of your choice. I added a little basil and a little oregano.

Boil the vegetables until they’re completely soft through. Mash them with a potato masher to check that they’re soft enough.

When they really mash completely, it’s time to transfer to the blender or food processor and bend completely.

Troubleshooting Your Vegan Carrot Sauce

There isn’t much that can go wrong which isn’t fixable.

• If you realise that there’s too much liquid in the pan, turn the heat up to high to reduce the liquid before you blend it.

• Taste the mashed vegetables before you blend, and decide if anything is lacking in the flavour. If it’s bland, add more salt.

• Other possibilities are to add some extra herbs or black pepper.

Alternative Ingredients for Carrot Sauce

The inspiration for this sauce comes from the Spanish vegetable purée.

Given the tastiness of vegetable purée, it wasn’t difficult to take it a step further and make it thinner so it could be used as a sauce on the side. Yum.

You can add so many variations to the ingredients. Potato is an obvious one, sweet potato also goes fine with this. A tiny bit of cauliflower or celery are also fine.

Avoid things like broccoli which will make the colour turn brown.

As for the flavourings, you could add garlic or chilli, ginger or coriander, cumin or basil. The world is yours. But because the beauty of this sauce is in its ability to be an instant creation, I keep it simple.

Just carrots, a couple of chunks of other veggies that I have in the fridge, salt, turmeric and away we go. This is never going to become a complexity of flavours on the tongue so I see no point in getting too elaborate with the ingredients.

Keep it simple and keep it clean in flavour. When you taste the final sauce, then it’s important to balance the flavour if necessary, by adding something of choice (soy sauce, lemon etc).