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Roasted Carrots

Roasted carrots simmered in a fat and flour base, finished with parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Roasted Carrots

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the carrots

  1. Wash, scrape, and cut the carrots lengthwise into halves and quarters, then crosswise into 1-inch pieces.

  2. Cover the carrots with boiling water and cook for 10 to 15 minutes with a little salt.

  3. Drain the water (save for soups).

Make the sauce and roast

  1. In a pan, brown some fat and flour.

  2. Add soup stock or the drained water.

  3. Roast the carrots in the mixture until done.

  4. Cover the carrots tightly and add more liquid if necessary.

  5. Flavor with chopped parsley.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Flour + parsleytop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together16,675 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Carrot + flourtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,029 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  4. Flour + wheytop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together39 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetaldehyde (pungent, ethereal).

  5. Carrot + wheytop 36% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together3 recipes

    Shared aroma: acetic acid (sour, vinegar).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Carrots
Are the main vegetable, softened by boiling and then finished by roasting in the sauce.
Fat
Carries flavor and, when browned with flour, adds a nutty, toasted aroma to the sauce.
Flour
Browned with fat, it thickens the liquid into a light sauce that coats the carrots.
Soup stock or whey
Provides the liquid that forms the sauce and keeps the carrots moist while they roast.

The step that matters

Covering the carrots and adding liquid. Covering traps steam so the carrots cook through gently and stay moist. If the liquid runs low the flour sauce can scorch on the pan and the carrots can dry out, so adding more liquid when needed keeps the braise steady.

Swap the carrot

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (flour, whey, parsley):

  1. Shallotfits about as well
  2. Carrotthe original
  3. Arrowrootfits about as well
  4. Beetrootfits about as well

Fit is the average pairing score against flour, whey, parsley. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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