Avoid Cooking Mistakes This Holiday: Use All Your Senses in the Kitchen

Photo: StockFood / Maskot Bildbyra AB

When you set your oven to 350?F, do you believe that it is an absolute and uniform measurement of temperature? Or 180?C, for that matter? If you live in Britain, you may turn your oven to gas 4. I have no idea what gas 4 means, but it might be the most honest measurement of the three as it does not refer to a specific temperature but rather denotes a temperature relative to the others on the dial, which is a better description of the relationship between 350?F and 325?F on your oven. Because the truth is, even if you were to cook on the same day that your oven had been professionally calibrated, some spots will be hotter than others. And if you’re following a recipe, how do you know that the recipe writer and the recipe tester had properly calibrated their ovens? Maybe they were off. Have you ever stopped to consider why we almost always ask for oven temperatures in increments of 25?F? On the Celsius scale, with the infinitely more useful factors of ten, there tends to be slightly more precision, but the same discrepancies apply: we don’t know the exact millimeters of mercury a thermometer would read were it positioned in your roasting pan—or even in two different positions in that same pan.

Ah, but you have an oven thermometer? Excellent. How do you know it is accurate? (It probably is; I’m just asking.)

Happily we don’t need to know the precise, +/? 0.1-degree measurement when we’re roasting a leg of lamb or some parsnips. Foods that we roast are generous and easygoing. Temperature and time are more critical for baked goods. Leave a second batch of cookies in for five extra minutes and you’ve got two different cookies (one may be ruined); do that with a roasted chicken and the difference is not likely to be noticeable. This also reflects the fact that the smaller the food item is, the smaller the window you have in terms of pulling it out of the oven at its moment of perfection.

More important than choosing 350?F/180?C rather than 375?F/190?C is paying attention to the food itself.

What this means cannot be overemphasized. If I am washing salad greens, with my back to the oven, I am still paying attention to that standing rib roast in the oven. If I’m washing greens, it means that dinner is nearly ready and the meat has been roasting for most of my intended cooking time, so if I don’t smell deliciousness in the kitchen, my oven is not hot enough. If I smell smoke, I need to pay even more attention and maybe turn around and use my eyes. If my rib roast has been in the oven for only 15 minutes and I hear violent crackling, I’d better check to make sure that the oven is not too hot. I certainly wouldn’t pay attention to the recipe in the book I was following because that won’t tell me anything about what my roast is doing in my oven at that moment.

So when you’re cooking, you’re using all your senses, the most important of which is common sense. And that just means paying attention. If you smell burning and your roast shouldn’t be close to done, you need to evaluate. And you should not simply pay attention to today’s chicken or pan of root vegetables and then hit the “reset” button in your brain. You should have roasted chicken and root vegetable files in the vault of your cooking experience. What happened last time, and the time before that? What could have been better last time that I can try to achieve this time?

Excerpted from Ruhlman’s How to Roast: Foolproof Techniques and Recipes for the Home Cook by Michael Ruhlman (Little, Brown and Company, 2014). 

Now, get to roasting!

The ultimate standing rib roast

The simplest and best roast chicken

Simple roast beef

What’s your trick for knowing when your food is cooked?