The Overlap
Maximizing Vegetables In The Oven
An oven is a closed environment at a constant temperature; oven cooking is passive cooking. Your only real variable is time. Ideal for baking, but for savory cooking? Almost.
The French Laundry Cookbook has a great chapter titled, “The Importance of Rabbits”. Thomas Keller recounts a hellish time learning to kill, butcher, and prepare rabbits for roasting. After all of the work and insanity of harvesting rabbits for the first time, he gave the impression he’d do everything short of climbing into the oven with them to ensure they were cooked perfectly. That hit me like a brick, and it’s always stuck with me. And I don’t mean just the broader principles of respecting your ingredients and being attentive, but the idea of babysitting your food as actively as is physically possible as it cooks. Obviously nobody’s climbing into a hot oven, and experienced cooks know that constantly opening and closing the oven door to make adjustments isn’t an option either. All of the preparation and manipulation for oven- and broiler-bound foods has to be done up front. I call my technique THE OVERLAP.
The Overlap is simply a way to prepare food for cooking by adjusting its spacial relationship to other items, as well as seasoning and oiling. The way that you can jump in the oven with your food is in your imagination and experience. What are zucchini slices under a broiler at 8 inches doing at minute 1? or minute 5? The answer to that is 1-steaming and 5-burning, but it is important to think about this for anything you put in an oven. I’ll use thinly sliced zucchini as a test case to illustrate most of the concepts I’m talking about…
Slice zucchini “cardboard thin” and turn on the broiler to high. Line a sheet tray with parchment paper or a Silpat. Season the parchment paper with olive oil, salt and pepper. Lay out the slices overlapping by 1/4 in an exact geometric manner. Season with salt, pepper, and olive oil. Lightly drag a pastry brush across slices trying not to disturb your pattern. Leave a 1/2 inch of space at the edge of the tray. The reason for the overlap is to manage the burning. If the slices were all separate they wouldn’t have the protection of the steam from their neighbors and would shrivel and burn too quickly. But if they overlap too much, they will just steam and overcook before getting color. Now lets recap what this configuration is meant to produce. It won’t be rearranged or the tray shaken. The preparation is done. This pattern is going under a broiler on the second highest rack. The objective is to get charred “grill” flavor from the top side, and the deeply satisfying slow cooked flavor from the bottom side. 3 separate 3 minute trips under the broiler will accomplish this. Give the tray a minute or 2 to rest in between broilings, or the whole thing gets a little out of hand and too violent. Play around with this. Ovens by design can all have the same temperature depending on equipment, but broilers are much different and you may have to adjust according to your power. Char the topside more than you would normally, and you will probably sacrifice the outer 5 percent to burnt. Remember that the entire bottom side will be soft and completely uncolored, so you can be aggressive with the amount of char on the topside. Let this rest for at least 5 minutes, like cookies. If you are lucky, the little bit of starch has been distributed around and lightly glued the slices together and they will behave like tissue paper. This will give you some interesting plating options. This technique is great for capturing the effect of this starch. When you grill the violence of the water bubbling out obliterates the starch and you just have mush after a few minutes. If you simply sauté zucchini pieces the starch gets lost in all of the water that comes out, and never gets to reform as a crispy thing. What we have done under the broiler with the Overlap is to coax out the starch and then let it settle back on the surface. Giving texture and helping the color.
On a side note: even though it looks pretty to serve ribbons of raw zucchini, don’t do it. They aren’t cucumbers. Deal with the starch. The Overlap is your solution.
Malleable perfect zucchini slices