Knowledge Base > Ken Rubin - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

Ken Rubin - Ask Me Anything (Office Hours)

This event was on Tuesday, December 13, 2022 at 11:00 am Pacific, 2:00 pm Eastern

Join Chef Ken Rubin in his virtual office as he welcomes all of your questions. This event was created for you and we encourage you to Ask Anything – from cooking techniques to cours… Read More.

Recorded

Question:

What is the best way to roast veggies without oil and still get them caramelized?

— Tina Simons

Answer:

this no oil roasting technique is a technique that I use all the time. I typically have you know good success with it. If I just kind of focus on the basics of roasting. Number one making sure you have a nice hot oven to work with I typically will do no oil roasting in that 400 to 425 range if you have the option for convection in your oven meaning that you have a fan. Quickly circulating air that helps with evenness. It helps with facilitating Browning. It helps to Wick moisture away from the surface of that vegetable to really encourage that Browning process even without oil coating your vegetables in some flavorful. A mixture can also help so things I might use if I'm coding vegetables and I want to create some extra flavor opportunity for color. I might use a splash of vinegar with some splash of some stock or some reduced fruit juice that works really really well in the past. I've even made reductions of different things where you could have some You know concentrated vegetable stock. It's just a small amount of something with some sugar in it like a juice or a vinegar can also really help. And you're just gonna very very lightly coat your vegetables. So say you're doing a no oil carrot roasting. You could literally take like a tablespoon or two of this flavorful liquid again broth or some reduced vinegar or some apple juice or anything really that's gonna complement the flavors. And code, you know coat the vegetables with that. Just enough to cover them. You're not looking to get them overly wet because again too much moisture will inhibit your Browning and your crisping in the roasting pan, but enough to kind of glaze them a little bit to encourage that Mario artifact that ability to have some Browning on the exterior. So temperature. Whatever you're using to coat that vegetable can also be helpful making sure that you've got pretty small Cuts. I find that again. Like I mentioned in a previous response. You don't want to have giant, you know, two inch pieces of vegetable. There's just gonna cook too slowly in that hot oven to create a nice effect. You want to have smaller pieces that are going to cook quickly that are well spaced. They have plenty of air circulation in this scenario, you know at that kind of 400 425 or even hotter with a convection you're essentially kind of modifying your oven into kind of a large air fryer really air fryer is very very similar closed space a lot of circulation of air high temperature sort of a situation. So that should work for you. The biggest things we see is not enough temperature. Cuts are too large and there's too much crowding of the vegetables meaning they're not really given a chance to cook. You know on the exterior or on the bottom where it's actually touching the pan just a few things to kind of look out for.
Ken Rubin

Ken Rubin

Chief Operating Officer

rouxbe.com