A Big Little Recipe has the smallest-possible ingredient list and big everything else—flavor, creativity, wow factor. Psst: We don't count water, salt, black pepper, and certain fats (specifically, 1/2 cup or less of olive oil, vegetable oil, and butter), since we're guessing you have those covered. This week, we’re roasting parsnips, but not for dinner.
While some dishes stay constant at my family’s Thanksgiving—like lemon-herb turkey and roasted potatoes and boozy cranberry sauce—dessert is a free-for-all. We’ve tried pecan pie, lemon pie, pumpkin pie, pumpkin ice cream pie, pumpkin mousse, apple galette, pear crisp, and dozens of others.
But never roasted vegetables.
Of course, roasted vegetables are the default side dish of fall and winter. (And, many tired nights, with a loaf of bread or bowl of pasta, they easily turn into a main.) Maybe it’s shallots or broccoli or squash. Almost always it’s savory.
These parsnips are not. Though they start out like any other roasted vegetable—drizzle of oil, pinch of salt, blazing oven—they end up as dessert. It’s a welcome departure from my usual uses for the ingredient (chicken soup or garlicky noodles).
Root vegetables are naturally starchy and sugary. And this sweetness becomes even more pronounced with cooking and baking. Hence why, for example, carrots are beloved in numerous desserts, from American layer cake to Indian gajar halwa.
As Harold McGee explains in On Food & Cooking, cooking “weakens the strong cell walls and frees the sugars to be tasted.” Add in the caramelization and browning from high-heat roasting, and you have even more flavor.
This is why many roasted vegetable recipes don’t stop at the oil and salt. They throw in savory ingredients—think garlic, anchovies, cheese—to remind us that, despite all the sweetness, this is a savory dish.
In this case, though, we’re not offsetting the sweetness. We’re emphasizing it. Enter our two other ingredients: granulated sugar and sour cream.
If you’ve never made caramel sauce before (or you have made it and things didn’t go well), let’s tackle it together. I’ll walk you through each step in the video above. Adding a splash of water at the start encourages even cooking, and resisting stirring at all costs sidesteps crystallization. As soon as the caramel is almost-but-not-quite as dark as you’d like, cut the heat, stir in sour cream (tanginess! creaminess!), and pat yourself on the back.
Even more sour cream serves as a downy comforter for the roasted parsnips to cuddle into. Once you add up these three components—the sugary caramel, the swooshy cream, the oven-sweetened vegetables—you get something that tastes like...yellow cake? But how? Who knows?
Sure, it’s not as classic as pumpkin pie. But it’s as cozy as raking leaves, as picking apples, as wearing two pairs of socks.
| 1/4 cup plus 1/3 cup | sour cream |
| 2 | pounds parsnips, peeled, ends trimmed |
| Vegetable oil | |
| Kosher salt | |
| 1/2 | cup granulated sugar |
| 1/4 cup plus 1/3 cup | sour cream |
| 2 | pounds parsnips, peeled, ends trimmed |
| Vegetable oil |
| Kosher salt | |
| 1/2 | cup granulated sugar |
Top-notch recipes, expert tips, and all the tools to pull off the year’s most memorable feast.
Check It Out
Written by: Emma Laperruque
Popular on Food52
9 Comments
Join The Conversation