Roasting skill - Kids' Kitchen
With safety front of mind, roasting is a skill that kids can master. Explore BBC Good Food's Kids' Kitchen videos, recipes and advice for more essential skills.
BBC Good Food’s series of Kids' Kitchen videos, recipes and advice will help you and your children learn essential skills for cooking, teaching you and them how to use these skills to create a variety of delicious dishes from scratch.
Learning to roast
So far in this series we’ve covered chopping, weighing and measuring, boiling, pan frying and baking, and in this instalment, we’ll look at roasting. With all these new skills under your belt, you’ll be able to cook almost anything! Roasting takes place in the oven, it can be a fairly quick or very slow method of cooking and is perfect for meat, large cuts of fish and many vegetables.
Recipes that use the roasting skill
Steps to success for roasting
- To roast, you can use a fan (usually indicted by a picture of a fan on the oven controls) or convection setting (usually indicated by a picture of two horizontal lines) and an electric or gas oven – our recipes give the correct temperatures for all these settings and oven types.
- When roasting, heat the oven at the beginning of the recipe to give it time to heat up to the correct temperature.
- Most foods should be roasted on an oven rack in the centre of the oven unless the recipe states otherwise. Check your oven rack is positioned correctly with enough space above to fit the tin before you turn the oven on.
Kitchen kit for roasting
Oven gloves – these are essential for protecting your hands when handling hot tins and trays. Look for thick gloves which fully cover your hands and, ideally, part of your wrists and arms. Use oven gloves when placing anything in or taking anything out of a hot oven.
Baking trays and roasting tins – baking trays are flat, often with a small lip around the edge, and are perfect for roasting potatoes, fish or vegetables. Roasting tins are deeper and will protect the sides of the food from burning as it cooks. Look for a nice sturdy tray but make sure it’s not too heavy for you to lift in and out of the oven.
Food thermometer/probe – this allows you to test the internal temperature of food. It’s particularly important when you’re roasting a large piece of meat as you can’t always tell if it’s cooked by looking at the outside.
Recipes that use the roasting skill
We’d love to see what you’ve been cooking. Send your pictures to us at goodfoodwebsite@immediate.co.uk or tag us online with #gfkidskitchen. Visit the Kids' Kitchen hub to learn even more skills.
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