Sheet pan roasting is one of my favorite ways to prepare vegetables. From carrots to Brussels sprouts to cauliflower, cooking this way is not only easy but quick. Cut them into equal sized pieces, sprinkle some oil of choice along with spice and salt, and you have the perfect meal accompaniment.
Roasting can be a healthy way to enjoy your vegetables. From a New York Times article in 2016:
If roasting vegetables will get people to eat them, I’d encourage people to roast them,” said Alice Lichtenstein, director of the cardiovascular nutrition lab at the Jean Mayer U.S.D.A. Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University in Boston. “The biggest battle is just getting people to eat enough fruits and vegetables.
Cooking vegetables does lower levels of some nutrients, especially water-soluble vitamins like C and some B vitamins. But it’s a trade off, because cooking can also make some nutrients easier for the body to absorb. Cooked tomatoes, for example, provide higher levels of lycopene, which may have cardiovascular benefits, and cooked carrots have higher levels of carotenoids, rich in antioxidants.
Roasting vegetables, though, takes some skill. It can be a fine line between the perfect brown crisp and caramelized flavor to something that reminds you of burnt toast fiascos of old.
There are multiple articles out there around the science behind why you should not eat burnt food like this one by the BBC. But this post isn’t really about that.
Because who hasn’t scraped off burnt toast before?
This is about when we cross the line into vegetable devastation. Every once in awhile, I walk away when I should be monitoring and end up with veggies just a wee bit into the burnt zone…
It is the saddest thing! And so hard be cause I hate wasting food. I posted on Facebook about this tragedy and several people chimed in that they would still eat them and it had me thinking, how burnt is too burnt? Not necessarily from a nutrition standpoint but from a personal preference. For this broccoli above, I picked out anything that still had a little green and ate it. Which wasn’t much.
But how about you? How burnt is too burnt? Would you have pitched the whole thing into the garbage can?
Editor’s note: I have to admit that it wasn’t that long ago I was self-righteous enough to admonish kids I knew sitting around the campfire who were eating burnt marshmallows. Yes, it is true.
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