Q: Is there any way to bake vegetables without them drying out?
Short answer: add moisture 🙂
Long answer: There are several options, depending on what kind of vegetable you’re talking about. To understand why this happens, you need to understand how an oven works. When you bake with an oven, you are using hot, dry air to cook something from the outside in. This hot, dry air caramelizes the sugars in food (turns them brown and crispy), which gives cookies that dark brown edge,vegetables that slightly sweet flavor, and breads their crust.
However, because the air is so hot, it tends to drive away humidity and moisture, much like a desert does. With no source of water, it gets rather parched inside your oven. So when the water molecules in the food you’re baking get hot, they evaporate rather than staying in the food.
So how do you solve this? Several ways:
First, try the microwave. I know, I know, this is sacrilegious. However, a microwave cooks food by exciting the molecules already inside the food, rather than evaporating and baking. This makes it an exceptionally good choice for already dry and/or stringy vegetables, such as squash. You are, in effect, steaming what you microwave in its own water and juices rather than “baking” it. However, this means you don’t get that brown, baked taste.
Second, try wrapping the veggies up in foil, perhaps with a bit of water, then baking them. What happens here is you create a “microclimate” where the water that evaporates from the veggies gets caught, and sticks around to create a humid environment.
Third, take a page from bread bakers in dry climates, and put a glass dish full of boiling water in the oven along with the veggies. You are, again, simply raising the ambient humidity of the oven, so not as much moisture evaporates.
Fourth, try “pan baking” – saute the veggies in a frying pan just long enough to get the carmelization, then add a few tablespoons of water or broth and cover with a tight-fitting lid. “Bake” on the stovetop, over low to medium heat, until the vegetables are tender. This combines steaming and baking. You could also saute and then microwave, although I wouldn’t recommend it, because that would cook everything at different rates, and you’d end up with mushy veggies.
Good luck!
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