The Mystery of Missing Vibes

Dear Tamar:

How do you roast vegetables? I can roast Brussels sprouts and they come out fine: I coat them with olive oil and salt, and they taste good. However, whenever I try to roast anything else, I fail. They are either too dry, rubbery, or just don't taste good.

-Send Me Some Chef Vibes

Dear Send Me Some Chef Vibes:

An unfortunate series of events coincided my sophomore year of high school. My father died (this was the worst), I became a committed cigarette smoker (this was second-worst), and I stopped taking science class (the third worst.)

The problem with science, for me, was abstraction. I had been taking chemistry. This sounds ironic: I make my living cooking and writing about cooking, and cooking is chemical reactions—all life is chemical reactions. But I wasn’t a cook then. And the well-meaning little white man with a little white mustache in a little white coat didn’t teach applied chemistry. He taught acids and bases and -oxides and…whatever. Chemistry was a series of irrelevant interactions. There were diagrams and test tubes. I hated it. I got a C. I quit. I turned into a 15-year old chain-smoking mystic, who interpreted the often vicious world via poetry, and anthropomorphism, and vibes.

Poetry, anthropomorphism, and vibes are a reasonable constellation of lenses for cooking if you’re just trying to understand things for yourself. In recent years, though, I’ve devoted a lot of energy to tending to the wounds of that year. I quit smoking decades ago. I’m considering mourning. I read your question about roasting vegetables and went back to the first book I wrote, where there’s most of a chapter on the subject. And I noticed that I’d skillfully dodged scientific explanation—as though by using enough metaphors I might avoid admitting that I didn’t know why.

I stand by the advice I gave then. I’m reprinting the best of it below so you have all I have to offer.

A hot oven is the rightful domain of a capable cook. It is what makes the roasted vegetables we eat at restaurants, where ovens are set to much higher temperatures than our are at home, so plainly, unremittingly good.

A hot oven is the most important thing. Second is enough oil—a lot. Third is salt.

The other advice in that chapter that really matters is below.

All vegetables other than squash and roots prefer to be roasted separately. Each has a slightly different makeup and cooking time and is easiest to cook correctly if you can know that once a piece or two of it tastes good and done, the whole tray of it is ready.

You’ve offered me an opportunity to keep tending wounds. I’ll take it to pad out the metaphor with science. The quantities of various sugars in various vegetables account for why one gets crisp and caramelized while another gets rubbery. Sucrose caramelizes at a higher temperature (340 F) than glucose (300 F) or fructose (220 F). If a vegetable is softening but evading a lovely caramel sheen, it may be higher in sucrose than what you roasted last and need a higher temperature yet. You don’t need a sugar-by-vegetable chart. If you notice it happening, turn the oven up. Also: oven temperatures rarely run true. Get an oven thermometer and make sure it reads 400 when you roast.

Brussels sprouts have more surface area than squash (or carrots or asparagus etc.) More surface area = more of a vegetable exposed to high heat. It also = more vegetable of a vegetable exposed to oil. It is not only a vegetable’s preference to be well oiled—as it is most humans’. Oil conducts heat. Oil creates a blanket which doesn’t evaporate from a vegetable’s surface the way water does. The heat the oil conducts goes directly into the cooking of the vegetable¹. Make sure each piece of any vegetable is very well coated in oil. If you have extra on the pan after roasting, pour it into a little bowl and dip bread in it.

In truth, dear cook, it takes fluctuating measures of spirituality and science to roast vegetables well. I wish I knew how to avoid clear dangers, and how to mourn. And I wish I knew the scientific justifications for the phenomena I know to be true. I imagine, though, that my reliance on ineluctable signs contributed to my choosing a career—cooking—whose basic medium is wordless. I send you all the cooking vibes I have, plus these early sorties into chemical knowledge. I hope they all land when and where they do you the most good.

You’ll see I’ve added a space on the Advice Seeking form asking for your Substack or IG or website. If you have a query AND have something you’d like to include, fill it in, and I’ll link to it when I answer your question!

1. I owe this to Harold McGee.