Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with roasting

Getting Potatoes Right

Fairchild — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:08:46 -0800

How can I make perfect baked potatoes while roasting other meats? I'm roasting a bone-in turkey breast that will take 1 3/4 - 2 hours at 325 degrees. I want to make four baked potatoes as well. Should I bake them at 325 for the entire time it takes to roast the turkey breast?

Last week I baked four small to medium sized baked potatoes on their own in a 350 degree oven for an hour and they were still undercooked. This method has never failed me, maybe I used to do them at 375 and forgot.

Thanks.

My oven is not a clown car

Joh — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 16:06:15 -0800

Oven management strategies for thanksgiving? I am hosting thanksgiving at my house this year, and need help planning the best strategy for making a large roast meal with insufficient oven space. There will be 14 attendees (possibly 15), so I need to cook a large turkey. Everyone is bringing a few dishes, in order to spread the workload, but as host I will be doing the turkey, and my favourite side dishes, which are roast potatoes, roast parsnips, yorkshire puddings and possibly some roast butternut squash too. Oh and gravy of course!

However, I cannot fit a large turkey AND all these dishes into the pitiful wall oven in my kitchen. So I'm looking for strategies to make this work. I can see a few options to look into:
1. Buy one of those electric roasters to do the turkey separately and free up oven space for the roast vegetables. I have never used one and have no idea if they make a decent end product. Will the skin get brown and crispy? Will there be drippings that I can use to make gravy at the end?
2. Buy a pre-cooked turkey somewhere and just cook the roast vegetables myself. Upside - don't have to cook the turkey myself. Downside - no dripping to make gravy :( How do you best re-heat a precooked turkey?
3. Pre-cook the turkey myself and then reheat it after the vegetables are done. Will the end product still be a decent roast turkey or is it more likely to be a bit dried up? While I have done roast dinners (and turkeys) several times, I am no expert cook, so I worry that I might end up with a rather dry, sad turkey.
4. Cut back the number of roast vegetable dishes I make :(
5. Make something other than turkey, that still feeds 15 but doesn't use up so much oven space, and goes well with all the usual thanksgiving trimmings.

Note: I have no interest in deep frying a turkey, as there will be several small children in attendance, plus its a fire hazard and I live in a extreme brush fire danger zone!

Coffee roaster that won't stink up the house?

middleclasstool — Tue, 20 May 2008 10:20:46 -0800

Good coffee roaster that'll cut down on the smoke? I've discovered home roasting and love the combo of quality and cost savings, but my wife hates the smoke. She's greenlighted me to invest in a home roaster, with one of two possibilities: either it makes just as much smoke as the popcorn popper does, so I have to go roast in our detached garage, or else it has to cut down on the smoke significantly so I can do it in the kitchen.

I'm prepared to do either one, honestly, especially if there's not a roaster out there that will both cut down on the smoke and do a good job roasting the beans. So if there's not a good one that eats smoke, just give me your recommendation for the best. Less than $200 US preferred.

(Roaster recommendations have been asked previously, but I'm asking again because the previous question is 3 years old.)

Now everybody's heard, about the bird

zap rowsdower — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 14:36:05 -0800

FoodFilter: I recall seeing on Good Eats a way to truss a chicken without using string... My google-fu has turned up nothing. Anyone know what I'm talking about? I can clearly remember Alton making some cuts and sticking the ends of the legs through to hold them, but nothing else about the wings, etc...

Capon for Thanksgiving

mccarty.tim — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 22:25:45 -0800

Anyone have any tips for roasting a capon? This year, my family only has 3 people for Thanksgiving. Thus, we bought a 12 lb capon instead of a tiny flat-chested turkey. A capon is a castrated rooster, if you didn't know. I was planning to treat it like a turkey, brining it overnight and then roasting it on a v-rack the next day under fairly high heat until the bird gets to temperature.

However, after a Google search, I found out that some sites claim that capons are naturally self-basting because of the bird's higher fat content. Is this true, and should I skip the brining? Some sites also claim a slow roast is best, but my experience has given me the best results using the Cooks Illustrated 2004 recipe for turkey when it comes to turkey.

Does anyone have any experience with this bird?

Blast-furnace turkey roasting?

exceptinsects — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 10:12:24 -0800

How can I cook a turkey when my oven is, shall we say, overenthusiastic? Here's the thing: my stove is ancient, probably from the 1940s or 50s. It is adorable and I love it, but the thermostat on the oven is broken, so it just gets hotter and hotter.

I can of course keep turning it on and off, but that's one thing when you're baking cookies for 15 minutes and another when you're roasting something for hours.

So, I wonder if anyone knows a method for roasting a turkey at a very high temperature, say 500 degrees F.

If it makes a difference, the turkey is quite small; I would guess it's less than ten pounds. (It's at home and I'm not so I can't check, but it was a "mini" size.)

Alternatively, if you have any suggestions for how to fix the thermostat, that would be great. I've looked around online but I haven't found instructions that look like I could do it myself, just places that want to buy your old stove and refurbish it.
I think the stove is an O'Keefe and Merritt.

Roast Whole Pineapple

mr_crash_davis — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 13:43:53 -0800

Tell me about how to roast a whole pineapple. So the supermarket had whole pineapples on sale last night. My wife and I love the whole roasted pineapples that are brought around at the rodizio restaurants. What's the proper way to roast a whole pineapple, rodizio-style?

Green Coffee Beans

vers — Sat, 11 Dec 2004 18:23:01 -0800

I'm looking for sources of high-quality green coffee beans for roasting. Christmas is coming (yikes), and I just learned my little brother has gone gourmet. Googling turns up plenty, but I've no firsthand way of separating the wheat from the chaff.