Tzimmes Recipe: How to Make Sweet Carrot Stew for the Holidays

The Sweetest Stew

If you want to understand what Jewish holiday cooking tastes like at its most comforting, start with tzimmes. It is a dish that barely qualifies as a recipe — carrots, honey, a little citrus, maybe some dried fruit, all cooked low and slow until everything turns golden and soft and impossibly sweet. It is the kind of food that makes a house smell like a holiday.

Tzimmes is a fixture on Rosh Hashanah tables, where its sweetness carries a specific wish: may the new year be as sweet as this dish. But it has also become a year-round comfort food in many Jewish homes, served alongside roasted chicken on Shabbat, tucked into holiday meals, or made simply because the weather turned cold and the kitchen needed warming.

The word itself has entered Yiddish idiom. When someone says “don’t make a whole tzimmes out of it,” they mean “don’t make a big fuss.” The irony is that tzimmes the dish could not be simpler.

Carrots and Their Meaning

Carrots are the backbone of tzimmes, and they carry a lovely linguistic tradition. In Yiddish, carrots are called meren, which also means “to increase” or “to multiply.” Eating carrots on Rosh Hashanah is therefore a kind of edible prayer — a hope that good deeds, blessings, and prosperity will multiply in the year ahead.

When carrots are sliced into coins, they add another layer of symbolism: the round golden discs resemble coins, representing wealth and abundance. This is the kind of thing that makes Jewish food culture so rich — even the way you cut a vegetable can carry meaning.

The Recipe

Yield: 8 servings Prep time: 15 minutes Cook time: 1½ hours

Ingredients

• 3 pounds (1.4 kg) carrots, peeled and cut into 1-inch rounds
• 1 cup (150 g) pitted prunes, halved
• ½ cup (75 g) dried apricots, halved
• ⅓ cup (80 ml) honey
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar
• Juice and zest of 1 orange
• Juice of 1 lemon
• 2 tablespoons butter or margarine
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• ½ teaspoon ground ginger
• ¼ teaspoon nutmeg
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 cup (240 ml) water or orange juice

Instructions

Combine. Preheat oven to 350°F (175°C). Place carrots, prunes, and apricots in a large baking dish or Dutch oven. In a small saucepan, warm honey, brown sugar, orange juice, orange zest, lemon juice, butter, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and salt until the butter melts and everything is combined. Pour over the carrots and fruit. Add water or orange juice.

Cover and cook. Cover tightly with foil or a lid. Bake for 1 hour, stirring once halfway through.

Uncover and glaze. Remove the cover and bake for an additional 30 minutes, until the carrots are very tender and the liquid has reduced to a thick, glossy glaze. Stir gently once or twice during this stage. The tzimmes is done when the sauce coats the carrots like honey — because, largely, it is.

Variations

Tzimmes is one of those dishes that seems to have as many variations as there are Jewish grandmothers. The carrot-and-honey version above is the most classic, but the tradition is wide open.

Sweet potato tzimmes adds cubed sweet potatoes to the mix, creating an even heartier dish. Some versions use sweet potatoes instead of carrots entirely.

Meat tzimmes is a substantial main course: flanken (short ribs) or brisket is braised with the carrots, prunes, and honey, producing a dish that is simultaneously sweet and savory, main course and side dish in one pot. This version was especially popular in Eastern European Jewish communities where tzimmes was the centerpiece of the Shabbat table.

Pineapple tzimmes is a mid-twentieth-century American Jewish innovation, adding canned pineapple chunks to the mix. It sounds unusual but works surprisingly well, the acidity of the pineapple balancing the sweetness of the honey.

Some recipes include a dumpling on top — a kneidel made from matzah meal, rolled into a ball and placed on the tzimmes for the last 30 minutes of cooking. This transforms the side dish into something closer to a complete meal.

The Comfort of Sweetness

There is a reason tzimmes has endured for centuries, and it is not just the taste. It is the simplicity, the warmth, the way a pot of tzimmes on the stove makes a kitchen feel like the right place to be. It requires almost no technique — you cut, you combine, you wait. The oven does the work, and time does the rest.

Tzimmes is the kind of food that tastes like it took all day, even though it took fifteen minutes of active work. It is the kind of food that tastes better the next day, when the flavors have deepened and the sauce has thickened. It is the kind of food that makes people close their eyes when they take the first bite and say, quietly, “this is exactly right.”

For Rosh Hashanah, for Shabbat, for a Tuesday night when you need something sweet and warm and grounding — tzimmes is exactly right.