Why is it that roaster ovens do not tend to brown foods? I’ve been told it has to do with moist heat, but, seeing as it does not have any way of keeping the moisture in that a regular or toaster oven does not, that doesn’t make sense to me.
It also doesn’t seem to be that it heats up more slowly: preheating it to a given temperature takes about as much time as an oven.
My only hypothesis is that it has to do with the two small holes in the lid. Would covering those mean I could actually bake in it?
(I have a feeling this will be moved to CS after a while, but, since I’m asking for science as much as cooking, I thought I might get some answers here.)
Browning is primarily a function of temperature. The Maillard reaction occurs around 350 degrees or higher. If a roaster oven is designed for long, slow cooking, or isn’t efficient enough to get that hot, then you won’t see browning. Dry heat does help the reaction along, but I think water is a problem mostly because it makes it harder to get the high temperature to begin with.
I’m not familiar with the oven model you’re talking about, so maybe someone else can offer suggestions about how to get there with it.
Well, the temperature is definitely set to over 350 (by the end 400), and it doesn’t brown. For example, I tried to make cornbread, and it completely cooked, but no browning, even after leaving it in twice as long.
My oven has it’s heating element burnt out, and while those are pretty cheap, it looks like you’d have to tear the stove out from the wall to replace it. (And we just got that wall fixed when we got our bathroom fixed.) But it’s broiler element still works, so I had to use that to brown the cornbread, taking cornbread out of the pan for the bottom. And, seeing as the broiler never shuts off, you have to be very quick about it.
Get a digital oven thermometer and put it in the roaster. I wonder if your oven is not calibrated and the temperature it says it is is not the temperature it actually is.
The trouble with those is the small volume saturates the air inside with moisture from whatever you cook. You need dryer air to get browning. You could brown meat at the start of cooking to seal the meat. For color you can smear the meat with a dark sauce like soy or worchestershire. Covering the holes in the lid might make things worse.
Now that makes the whole dry vs wet air thing make sense. I wonder if letting more of the air out would help, as long as I can keep the device up to temperature.
It also explains why one remedy I’ve read about–turning the baked food on its side–might work: the water drains out.
ONe problem, though: dutch ovens are usually even smaller than these pans. Why can they be used for baking?
I think it has something to do with the uneven heating. I have a 20 quart roaster that cooks turkeys fine, but they don’t brown on the top. They do brown on the sides, however, where the heating element is. It also probably has something to do with the small volume versus a full size oven, which can maintin even heat better by virtue of its larger size.
I think **Fear Itself **answers that. The dutch oven should get much hotter all over by conducting heat through a large thermal mass. The roasters have a thin metal liner and heat is concentrated in one spot. I haven’t used a dutch oven much, my mother had one but mainly has kept it as a decorative piece. I understand the proper use would be to preheat it in an oven or on a stovetop, and brown meat in in before roasting.
Yes, I’ve seen this. But it’s a lot more complex than that. The nature of the meat, the searing process, the cooking process, all contribute to the end result. So searing is a better term than sealing. Someone mentioned in another thread sometime that searing can be done at the end of the cooking phase instead of the beginning, haven’t tried that technique yet. But overall, IMHO, the wikipedia entry is a little misleading by implying there is no effect of sealing by browning.