- Julia Child’s tips for perfectly roasted vegetables according to her cookbooks and recipes.
- The best roasted vegetables always begin with firm, crisp, fresh vegetables—ripe but not too ripe.
- High-heat cooking and coating veggies in fat helps with even browning and seasonings stick better.
With her culinary career accolades including master of French cuisine, first female TV cooking show host, author and co-author of nearly 20 cookbooks and firm believer that butter makes everything better (reason alone to trust her advice), there’s no doubt that the following tips from Julia Child for roasting vegetables are nothing less than life-changing.
Ahead, you’ll discover everything from how to choose the right vegetables for roasting and how to properly prep them to why a scorching-hot oven is essential. And there’s even a common mistake to avoid that you won’t want to miss.
Choose the Right Vegetables
If there’s one tip that can be found in most, if not all, of Julia’s cookbooks, it’s how to choose the right vegetables. And when it comes to those intended for roasting, Julia emphasizes selecting firm, crisp vegetables so that they better retain their flavor, shape and texture while cooking at high temperatures. In other words, fresh, ripe vegetables are what you should always be looking (and smelling) for. But not too ripe or you’ll risk mushy results.
Make Sure the Oven Is Hot Enough
Preheat your oven to between 400°F and 450°F when roasting vegetables. This higher heat promotes browning while allowing vegetables to cook more quickly and retain more of their moisture. And it’s why you’ll notice this temperature range is called for in many of Julia’s vegetable recipes. Recipes that call for a lower temperature will typically have longer cooking times and often require the addition of more ingredients. They are also considered baking rather than roasting, which requires intense, dry heat to produce the right results.
Trim and Cut the Vegetables Into Smaller Pieces
In The Way to Cook and Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia specifies the importance of trimming vegetables—such as broccoli stalks and the lower part of asparagus spears—noting that this step isn’t just for looks but also to remove the tough portions so that the entire vegetable is more pleasant to eat.
For large vegetables, like whole broccoli heads, Julia offers this tip in Mastering: “Fresh broccoli will cook much more rapidly and stay greener if you divide the flowerets about 3 inches long […].” Because the whole idea behind roasting vegetables (see the hot oven tip) is quick caramelization, it’s a clue that shouldn’t be overlooked.
Pre-Salt (Some) Vegetables
Not all vegetables will require salting before roasting, but for some, according to Julia, it’s a must—like eggplant and sometimes even some soft squashes (which are both technically fruits). In Julia’s Kitchen Wisdom, the French-trained chef says eggplant rounds should be salted lightly on both sides and left to sweat on paper towels for 20 to 30 minutes before roasting. This step helps prevent sogginess and bitterness, resulting in perfectly roasted veggies.
Coat the Vegetables
Another key strategy for roasting vegetables is using some sort of fat to coat the veggies. This technique promotes even browning and helps seasonings stick. It can be found throughout Julia’s recipes—including Tomates Grillées au Four from Mastering, where she instructs home cooks to brush the tomatoes with olive oil before placing them in the roasting pan. And while you generally want to avoid introducing too much moisture when roasting vegetables, sometimes Julia would even baste hers with the roasting juices during the cooking process—a technique that works well with heartier vegetables like winter squashes.
Give the Vegetables Some Room
In Julia’s Tomates à La Provençale recipe (and her previously mentioned tomato recipe), she notes to avoid crowding the tomatoes in the pan. And it’s a tip you won’t want to skip, since vegetables that aren’t spaced out enough will steam rather than roast—which means they won’t brown well and will have a mushy texture.
The Bottom Line
If you’re not familiar with roasting vegetables or just haven’t had much luck with past attempts, following these simple tips by one of the most-loved and well-known masters of French food is sure to give you perfect results, not to mention confidence—after all, one of Julia’s most important career goals was to make sophisticated cooking more accessible to the everyday home cook.
