A funny thing happened while I was researching the topic of “roasting” for this week’s Back to Basics series. I came to the realization that sometimes, you just have to learn by doing.
Last year when I thought I’d have time to write an ebook, I looked up instructions for roasting vegetables in several cookbooks. I was amazed at the variety of cooking times and temperatures.
Yesterday, when I was looking up how to roast a chicken, I discovered much the same thing. I had to laugh out loud when two of my most treasured reference books by respected authors contradicted each other.
For example, Keys to Good Cooking had the following piece of advice:
Don’t truss the legs--trussed legs look neater but take longer to cook through, and longer cooking times make it even more likely that the breast will be overcooked
Whereas Ruhlman’s Twenty had this to say:
The most common reason people end up with a dry and flavorless breast is that they fail to address what is happening in the cavity of the bird. If the ends of the legs are not tied together in front of the cavity or if the cavity is empty, hot air swirls around the cavity of the bird, cooking the breast from the inside out. To prevent this, you must truss the chicken.
Baste, don’t baste. Tent, don’t tent. Cook in a covered stone crock, cook in a frying pan. The one thing they all agree on is not to rely on a pop up timer (which just tells you it’s already overcooked) and to bring the meat to room temperature before cooking. Other than that, sounds like it all boils down to your own preference. My husband prefers to cook his in his Smoker Roaster Grill, as I described in How to Roast a Yardbird.
Regardless of the particulars, roasting DOES provide a delicious, easy way of cooking meats and vegetables, as I’ll share throughout the week. Again, the point of this series is not to give exact advice on how to work with a particular ingredient or master a particular skill, but to encourage you to stretch your cooking comfort zone and to try it–there’s no better way of learning than by just trying it and seeing what happens.
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It doesn’t matter what the books say around my house – my oven has a mind of it’s own. 350 most of the time feels like 300 except when the oven is preheating, then it feels like 400. It’s a gas stove so I have no idea how this is happening, but it’s frustrating to try to bake something tricky like a souffle, where temperature is everything.
So whenever I bake something, I cover it if I don’t want it dried out and I have to check it often. Is it any wonder I use my turkey roaster as an oven more often than not?!!
great point! There are oven thermometers that will tell you the exact temperature in there, but trial and error seem to work too.
Yeah, I tried one or two of those things. I tried hanging it in several different spots in the oven and each time I got a different reading. Thing is, my oven seems to go up and down in degree as things are baking, and of course, every time I open the door it starts the whole process over. But if I don’t keep checking I don’t have any idea what’s going on in there. I’ve been asking for a new oven for two years but it appears I’ll have to wait a while yet – they don’t give those things away. We got a new fridge last year and it’s never worked right, and my dishwasher is simply there to store dirty dishes until I get time to wash them, because it does a lot of things but it doesn’t “clean” the dishes. I’m so frustrated with all the modern appliances.
My husband says I’m “electrically charged” because every time we have some new thing it stops working or doesn’t work like it should after its been around me for a time. ;-> But that doesn’t explain the goofiness of my gas stove, does it? Heh.