Last time I mentioned the evils of boiling. I’m going to carry on with this theme this week, with a quick note on root vegetables.

Generations have grown up believing they don’t like cooked carrots. I was among them for years, until I saw the light and discovered the reason I didn’t like cooked carrots.

It was because every cooked carrot I’d ever eaten was badly cooked.

Sounds implausible, doesn’t it? Surely not every one? Yep, every one.

Now, I’m not claiming that no one knows how to cook carrots right except me. I certainly didn’t come up with any of the guru like wisdom I am to impart upon you today. I didn’t even have to trek thousands of miles through the snow covered mountains to seek out the hidden valleys and learn at the feet of the secret masters of Tibet in order to discover this information (I’ll save the recipes I learnt there for later). But there are two mistakes which are sufficiently widely spread that you’ve got a good chance of never finding out what a good cooked carrot is like. These wicked ways are gradually losing ground, but it’s still a battle that needs fighting.

I’ve already telegraphed the main point I’m going to make, so I may as well come out with it now. Do not boil carrots. Ever. You will leach out all the flavour, and the results are horrible. (It’s slightly different in soups, curries, etc, but even then the less time the carrots spend cooking in the water the better). Steaming isn’t great either – it suffers from most of the same problems as boiling, just not as severely.

The second point is slightly less hard and fast. If you can get away with it, you really shouldn’t peel your carrots. You lose a lot of flavour and nutritional value in doing so. The best thing to do is to just give them a good rinse (or scrub if they’re not very clean or you’re feeling virtuous). That being said, sometimes the skin is a bit manky and it’s generally OK to peel them. The result will not be as good, but it’s still decent.

So, that’s how you don’t cook carrots. But how do you cook them?

Easy! You roast them. The recipe is simplicity itself. Once you’ve cleaned them, cut off the ends. Then cut them lengthwise – I usually either cut them in half, or into quarters if they’re particularly thick. Cut the pieces down till they’re not too long. Now toss them with olive oil, coarse salt and (if you want) ground black pepper. Roast at high temperature (say about 200-220C, but I’m not very precise with the temperatures I use) until the carrots are soft. You may be forced to endure trying one every now and then to make sure they’re not undercooked.

This has a number of advantages. The combination of salt and roasting dehydrates the carrots, concentrating the flavour, and the roasting at high temperatures changes its character in interesting ways.

Of course, having said that one of the reasons you shouldn’t skin carrots is that this removes a lot of the nutritional value, roasting them doesn’t do wonders for the vitamin content either (it breaks down the long chain chemicals). But I don’t really worry about that too much – it tastes great, and there’s still plenty of stuff in there you can pretend is healthy.

Essentially this method works very well with other root vegetables as well. In particular parsnips and sweet potatoes (these will both go much softer than carrots will). Potatoes I do generally boil first – not to the point where they’re cooked, but some of the way. In this case it’s really very important you don’t peel them, as the skins help to protect the potatoey goodness from the evil boiling water.