At their best, sheet-pan dinners are easy, convenient, and delicious. They key is to be smart about them. Here's how.
At their best, sheet-pan dinners are easy, convenient, and delicious. They key is to be smart about them. Here's how.
So here's my advice on how to approach sheet-pan dinners and the key techniques and considerations to getting the best possible results."Just because you can doesn't mean you should." "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail." How many clichés can I throw at this thing? Look, the bottom line is that there's no need to cook a sheet-pan dinner for its own sake. Do it if it makes sense.
Of course, I'm not saying you have to prepare extra food just to achieve this admittedly arbitrary designation; you should make whatever you want for dinner. One of my most frequent at-home meals is a protein cooked on a sheet pan in the oven and a salad to eat with it. But in my mind, that's not enough to make it a true sheet-pan dinner.A small eighth-sheet pan is one-quarter the size of a standard half-sheet pan.
The advantage of giving yourself the option of using multiple smaller trays instead of limiting yourself to a single larger one is it solves one of the bigger challenges of sheet-pan dinners: the use of space and timing. If you're roasting chicken thighs on one quarter-sheet while your vegetables cook on another, you can pull each from the oven when they are ready.
Get familiar with your oven and learn to make whatever adjustments are necessary, so that the recipe will work in your home. No recipe can do that for you.Okay, so we've defined our terms, set our general objectives, and paid mind to our equipment. Now it's time to cook. This is where things get interesting, and tricky, and fun.
How you cut your ingredients will have a direct impact on how they cook. Take these carrots as an example: The ones on the tray on the left were cooked at a lower temperature, while the ones on the right were cooked in a hot oven. The lower-temp oven didn't do much beyond steam the carrots, regardless of size , while the hot oven browned them deeply. The finely cut carrots, though, clearly burned all over while the larger pieces have a deep but delicious-looking level of browning.
Every sheet-pan recipe you cook should include a consideration of which ingredients you might want to arrange around the periphery and which you might want to keep in the center. In some cases, if you want even browning, you may need to grab a spatula and move the ingredients around, transferring the pieces in the center to the edges and the edges to the center, so that everything gets its turn in the hot zone.
Those are just a few examples of how to manipulate space on a baking sheet. What else can you dream up?Salmon tends to be an oilier fish that, even if cooked through more fully as in the bottom photo, will still be tasty. Not all fish and meats are so forgiving. More often than not, one of the main things you'll want to accomplish with a sheet-pan dinner is developing a good "sear" on your food, which can be difficult when you're not relying on the conduction of heat straight from a screaming hot pan into your food on the stovetop.
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Fashion Cheat Sheet: Essential Fall 2024 StylesFun fall trends for 2024
Read more »
Fantasy Football Week 7 start/sit cheat sheet best adviceWe've curated a week's worth of our best fantasy football advice in a single game-by-game cheat sheet so you can quickly make your lineup decisions for Week 7.
Read more »
The 8 Best Sheet Masks for an Instant Glow, Tested and Reviewed by EditorsBiodance Bio-Collagen Real Deep Masks are TikTok's favorite sheet mask, hands-down. The product has amassed tens of millions of double taps, with users calling it everything from a 'pore eraser' to 'the only product you need for glass skin.
Read more »
Fantasy Football Week 5 start/sit cheat sheet best adviceWe've curated a week's worth of our best fantasy football advice in a single game-by-game cheat sheet so you can quickly make your lineup decisions for Week 5.
Read more »
Fantasy Football Week 6 start/sit cheat sheet best adviceWe've curated a week's worth of our best fantasy football advice in a single game-by-game cheat sheet so you can quickly make your lineup decisions for Week 6.
Read more »
Fantasy Football Week 8 start/sit cheat sheet best adviceWe've curated a week's worth of our best fantasy football advice in a single game-by-game cheat sheet so you can quickly make your lineup decisions for Week 8.
Read more »