The New Pot Roast Is a Pile of Carrots (or Beets)

Nothing is new in the world of cooking, but pot-roasting is really,reallynot new. Pot roasts are the stuff of Sunday dinner nostalgia—maybe we had them at our own table growing up, but more likely our vague recollections come from black-and-white reruns on TV. Those pot roasts weremostly beef affairs, with a few chunks of carrot and onion thrown in, but sometimes it waslamb, sometimes it waschicken. Rarely, if ever, did it consist solely of leeks.

In chef Ned Baldwin’s cookbookHow to Dress an Egg,pot roasts made up of a single vegetable appear repeatedly. There are pot-roasted leeks, pot-roasted carrots, pot-roasted beets, and pot-roasted spring onions. The treatment he gives these vegetables is the same as he gives pork shoulder, which leads me to believe that all of these dishes can be considered proper “pot roasts.” So why do I want to call the vegetables not pot roasts butpot-roastedinstead? Probably because it sounds more modern, and in 2021, pot-roasting vegetables is a novel idea.

How to Dress an Egg: Surprising and Simple Ways to Cook Dinner

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In fact, pot-roasting vegetables seems almost rebellious, as it’s a departure from the well-accepted standard—vegetables roasted on a sheet pan. Unlike tray-roasted veg,pot-roasted vegetables have no caramelized, blackened edges, and they do not shrink by 30 percent as their moisture is annihilated by a 400-degree oven. No, to pot-roast a vegetable is to choose purity over transformation. Pot-roasted vegetables emerge looking pretty much the same as they did when they went in, an expression of the vegetable that is second only to eating it raw. No golden brown tops. No burnt crispy bits. “You’re really eating the thing in and of itself,” Baldwin said to me over the phone.

There’s nothing to the method: Toss a fistful of whole vegetables (scrubbed carrots, trimmed beets) with a little bit of oil (as little as a teaspoon or up to a couple of tablespoons). Lay the vegetables in a single layer in a Dutch oven, cover the pot with foil, and fit the lid over the foil. Cook at a low temperature (250 degrees for the leeks, 300 for the carrots) until the vegetables can handle a thin knife with no resistance.

This may take some time. I tried it with some bulbous winter beets recently, and they cooked for a little over an hour. The beets that finally came out of the pan were soft and sweet, and tasted as if—thanks to the tight seal on the lid—none of the vegetable’s flavor had a chance to escape. (Compare this to boiling the vegetables in water, where Baldwin says “some of the sugars and essence [of the vegetable] are going to be diluted.”)

“The low temperature is as important as the closed system,” Baldwin told me. If the oven gets too hot, the vegetables can scorch, and in that case, well, you should have just roasted them on a sheet pan.

Not that there’s anything wrong with tray-roasted vegetables! They’re never going away, and I don’t want them to. But this spring, when sugary new carrots, beets, and alliums come out of the ground, maybe we should roast them gently. Let them retain their youth. When they come out of the oven, we can top them with the big flavors Baldwin favors: anchovies, garlic, sumac. They’ll be bright and sweet and punchy—a pot roast the likes of which we ought to see more often.

Young Carrots With Spring Onions, Sumac, and Anchovies

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