It's no secret that the best cooked vegetables are roasted ones. Steam them and they're limp and flavourless. Sauté them and you'll be babysitting the burner all night. What the microwave does to a crunchy batch of broccoli should be illegal.
You've probably read all the tricks to getting the best roasted vegetables, too: the amount of oil you should use, the exact number of asparagus spears you should put on a pan. They're all true for the most part, but there's another piece of advice you've probably never heard before — and it's a total game changer.
You should always roast vegetables on the bottom of your oven.
We're not talking the bottom rack here: Disregard the rack altogether, and place your pan right on the oven floor.
According to Food52, that surface is where the oven reaches its hottest temperatures, plus your pan is exposed to direct heat. The tip comes from Carolynn Carreño's cookbook, Bowls of Plenty. Her strategy is to bake two sheet trays of veggies at 500° for 20 minutes, placing one on the oven floor and one on the bottom rack, switching them halfway through.
Sarah Weinberg is the deputy editor at Delish and has covered food, travel, home, and lifestyle for a number of publications, including Food Network Magazine and Country Living. She's originally from the Bay Area, has an unhealthy affinity for the Real Housewives of Anywhere, and harbors strong feelings about fruit salad.
