This question is inspired by this week's cooking of a 3kg (estimate – it was plenty huge and took 6 people to eat) courgette / zucchini. The 'quote' is a digression about what happened – skip it if you will).
I had created two 'boats' to stuff:
the 'hull' was about 2 cm thick.My guesstimate at how long it should
cook was 30 minutes at 160C, and then
check.In the end I used about 20 minutes at
160, 10 minutes at 180, and 10 minutes
at oven full blast (~260). You can
probably tell it wasn't cooking fast enough and I just wanted to pump in heat at some point.I started with visual inspection to
see whether it was cooking well: at
some point I decided to stick my
digital probe in the 'hull'. The
temperature was 82C when I pulled it
out of the oven: this produced a good
result.
My question: can you determine how well a vegetable is cooked (in the oven) through this type of probe use, and what temperature should a vegetable reach (a table would be ideal, but any answer's welcome).
Best Answer
The typical sous vide temperature for most vegetables is right around 82-83 C, so I think you nailed it. Of course it is much more difficult to reach a consistent temperature in the oven than sous vide, but the texture at a given temperature should be roughly equivalent.