The counter-intuitive tip for perfectly tender roasted broccoli

Does your roasted broccoli come out dry and tough? Don’t blame yourself. Blame the geometry of broccoli. It is difficult to uniform heating a tree -shaped structure. Many other vegetables, such as sweet potatoes, winter squash, carrots and potatoes, can be cut so that they have flat surfaces that uniformly touch a sheet in sheet metal, which allows them to brown well on their entire surface. Broccoli, however, not so much. Even if you slots in transverse section to make the flagships and the trackets flat on one side, the other side is a complex mixture of air spaces, tender buds and thick stems.

Botanically speaking, broccoli is an immature flowery structure of bunches of green flowers attached to a thick rod. Bring the heat to spread evenly so that the stem softens to the right level, without On excessively on the bunches of flowers, so that they are brittle and bitter is not an easy task. There are several things you can do to save your broccoli from this tough spell, but perhaps the most counter-intuitive trick I have discovered is to ignore all these rules on the application of dry heat during roasting and give your broccoli a little humidity at the end of its cooking time. Read the rest to understand why it works.

How steam improves roasted broccoli

As much as I like a good roasted vegetable in the oven, I hate to open the oven to charred and too blackened vegetation. All the time and the efforts that preparation and roasting end up being wasted. At high temperatures, the last five minutes of the oven can make or break the recipe. I prefer to remove the flagships a little early and be safe to risk burning everything, but when you pull it early, the stems can be unpleasant or difficult and provide resistance that many people don’t like.

To get around this problem, here is an easy solution: after the time of initial roast, when the broccoli is well golden but not quite tender, pull the pan from the oven and immediately cover the pan closely with aluminum paper to trap the steam, then let it stand for about 10 minutes to soften the broccoli. Even better, you can place the covered tray in the oven to be removed to cook in the residual heat for only five minutes. After five minutes, you will have a well -roasted, golden and tender broccoli.

I got to this approach after a lot of experimentation. My initial idea was microwave the broccoli for a minute until it is just soft, then finish it by roasting it in the oven. However, from my repeated experiences, I observed that steam before roasting slows down the browning process and I also found that the roasting process followed by steam has better delivered a flavor.

I can see two possible reasons for this. First of all, when you zap him / steamed, we quickly close what is called “the enzymatic activity of myrosinase” and this prevents the development of certain molecules of flavor. A second possible reason, based on the Harold McGee On food and cookingIt is that decomposing the structure of the broccoli with steam could expose the florets to their own natural acids, thus slowing the reaction of Maillard. Although there may be cases in which steam before roasting works well, in my tests with broccoli, I found that roasting before vapor was the best bet.

Steam is a very powerful force

It is easy to confuse steam as a low energy source, but when it is effectively trapped, steam can be a great source of energy due to a concept called “latent vaporization” – and this energy is only the ticket to soften vegetables everywhere. Until we reached the boiling point of water, the relationship between the heat supply and the resulting temperature is quite linear and simple. The more heat input there is; The higher the water temperature. But once it reaches the boiling point, the water molecules must move from the liquid phase to the gas phase. They need additional heat to break the intermolecular bonds and convert into vapor. Water has a relatively high latent heat of vaporization. It takes 540 energy calories to spray a gram of water to its boiling point (100 ° C), against only 1 calorie of energy to increase 1 gram of water from 99 ° C to 100 ° C. Consequently, during condensation, the latent heat of vaporization absorbed during the vaporization process is released. In simple terms, this means that excess energy absorbed when the water turns into steam is released when the steam condenses on the parts. This latent heat cooked and softens vegetables everywhere.

Other factors that affect roasted broccoli

Now that we have incorporated humidity into the broccoli roasting process, take a look at other factors that make the best roasted broccoli.

Hit your broccoli with high heat

My tests have confirmed what Kenji’s easy roasted broccoli recipe recommends: The best way to roast the broccoli is at high temperature for a short period. With most roasted vegetables, the final goal is to make it tasty and brown, pressing in the wonders of the Maillard reaction. When cooked properly, the roasted broccoli in the oven develops a rich concentration of flavors, even with just an aroma of oil and salt.

I tested the roasting of broccoli at three different temperatures (350, 425 and 500 ° F) and temporal settings (10, 20 and 30 minutes) and I found that when you cook the broccoli at lower temperatures for a longer period, it is dehydrated and in the same creance because the shape extinct allows you to escape. (Kenji also found that the implementation of the oven in high heat allows the sweet flavors of the broccoli to develop rather

Avoid convection adjustment

A convection oven circulates in the air inside the oven using a fan and an exhaust. I am generally a big fan of the convection frame in the oven (plan of word planned). The use of convection adjustment is an excellent option during the roasting and concentration of flavors in water -rich vegetables such as zucchini, but in my experiences, this did not work well with broccoli. Given the spreading structure of the flagships and air spaces between the buds, the adjustment of the convection dries the broccoli too quickly, which makes it copper of texture. In my tests, I noticed that the constant blowing of hot air removes too much humidity. (I also found the same problem with the air fryer, which is not surprising since the air fryer circulates as a convection oven.) So, if your oven has a convection adjustment, I recommend that you deactivate it and stay with the traditional cooking adjustment.

With the addition of humidity, the use of high heat and the avoidance of convection adjustment, you are ready to make the best broccoli, despite the delicate structure of vegetables. Good roasting!

March 2024