Real Men Roast
June 11, 2010, By Josh Katzowitz 0 comments
I stood at the bar top separating my kitchen from my dining room, and the air of a roasted Asian delicacy swirled around me. I was about to put a piece of sushi in my mouth, as I awaited the main event – an experiment in Oven Olympics, as I determined how real men roast.
First, an important question.
What’s the difference between baking and roasting? I didn’t have a clue. The difference between broiling and roasting? No idea. I could tell you how baking differs from broiling – I had already experimented with real men broil – but when it comes to roasting, I was lost.
That’s why when my mother in law, Susan, bought pork tenderloin to cook for dinner one night, I insisted that we roast it – whatever that entailed.
Lucky for me, Susan is a master chef (at least in our eyes), so when I asked her the difference between roasting and any other type of cooking, she replied knowingly, “I have no idea.”
She was sort of kidding (a strong emphasis on the “sort of”), but in reality, there doesn’t appear to be much of a difference in roasting and baking, with the exception of some semantic points. You roast meats. You bake cookies and pastries.
But according to ochef.com, here’s the real difference: “There is no difference. If you want to be finicky or traditional, you can’t actually roast food in an oven – to roast traditionally meant to cook food (meat) with an open flame, as on a spit in front of a fire (as opposed to grilling on a grate over a fire). But the fire and its radiant heat were the essential components of roasting. Nowadays, roast is bake and bake is roast.”
There are some minute differences, though, and mostly, they have to do with preference for that particular meal. Mostly, it’s a difference in temperature and a difference in how much liquid in which you want to cook your meat.
If you’re roasting, you don’t want moisture on the meat, and you’re cooking it about 400 degrees in the oven. If you’re cooking it in its own juices and the temperature is set for 325 degrees, you’re baking it.
It helps also if you have a convection oven- which is nearly identical to a conventional oven, except for the fan inside that circulates the heated air throughout the enclosure. This means the food will cook faster and at a lower temperature.
But I don’t have a convection oven, so we’re going to roast this pork tenderloin by cooking it at a higher temperature in my conventional oven. First, we’ll have to secure a roasting pan, which involves a grate that sits a few inches off the bottom of the pan so the juices run off the meat and onto the aluminum foil-covered bottom.
Second, we made the marinade. Since we’re going Asian-style for tonight’s dinner, we mix a concoction of Hoisin sauce, soy sauce, chopped garlic, sesame oil and a bit of ground ginger. After the pork sat in the marinade for two hours, we stuck it in the oven.
Twenty minutes later, the house smelled delicious. The pork was nearly done, the asparagus was sautéing in a pan, the rice was warming and the fried egg rolls were steaming. The original marinade was boiling on the stove so we could use that as gravy.
We polished off the mediocre store-bought sushi appetizer and sat down to plow into the pork. It was tender and delicious. It had a nice flavor, and the hot meat filled our bellies.
It was then I discovered the answer to my important question – the difference between roasting and baking? I answered the question with another question of my own: if it tastes fantastic, who really cares?
Roast it or bake it. As long as the meat tastes wonderful, the semantics don’t matter. If you’re reaching for seconds, it’s been a successful experience.
Josh Katzowitz lives in Atlanta and covers the NFL for CBSSports.com. He is a featured contributor to ManoftheHouse.com and author of the book, Bearcats Rising. He's currently working on a book about pro football that is scheduled to be released in 2012.
