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Hello!
Today’s issue covers a topic I get LOADS of questions about – multi-dish cooking in your steam oven. I cook multiple dishes almost daily using my steam oven and I’ve got all kinds of weird and wonderful tricks to manage the output I require with three very hungry boys!
This is a broad topic so I’ve tried to give you general pointers, as well as a real-life, low tech example of how I plan and execute multiple dishes in my own kitchen. Feel free to follow up with questions if there’s something else you want to know about multi-dish meals; I’m always happy to talk about making our cooking lives easier and more efficient.
For those of you who can never get enough recipes, I’m also sharing a (very retro but very tasty) meatloaf dinner that steps you through a simplified meat-and-two-veg preparation in one oven.
Happy steam oven cooking, see you in October (is it just me whose stomach turns a little at the thought that we’re already looking down the barrel of ‘end of year’?!).
Emily x
New to Learn: Multi-Dish Cooking in Your Steam Oven
Multi-dish cooking in your steam oven offers unique advantages like even cooking, speed and excellent food quality. To master it, though, you need to understand how to plan, prep and position your dishes, as well as adjust cooking times and settings to suit.
Whether you’re preparing appetizers, mains, sides, or desserts (or all of those at once!), these are my tips for harnessing multi-dish cooking and using your steam oven to its full potential.
New to Cook: Meatloaf with Baked Potatoes and Buttery Beans
This is a great, if a little retro-classic, multi-dish meal for your steam oven, with tender meatloaf, fluffy baked potatoes and buttery green beans. The recipe makes twice the meatloaf you’ll need for dinner, so you can freeze one for another meal.
A Thing I'm Loving
Seeing as I shared my cooking planning scrawl from one of my many notebooks in today’s New to Learn article, perhaps some of you are in the market for a good notebook?
After years, and multiple attempts at attempting to digitize all my handwritten notes*, I’ve recently returned to paper and pen for my diary/planner and note-taking needs. I use a modified, simple bullet journal method and find it keeps me organized and productive across home and work life. A stationery tragic from childhood, my preferred paper and pen setup is this lovely Scribbles That Matter notebook and a range of Frixion erasable pens and markers.
Ask Me Anything (AMA)
Here’s your opportunity to ask me anything you like related to combi steam cooking!
I encourage all Insiders to submit questions, and do my best to answer as many as possible. I am not able to get to every single question but I carefully curate those which are relevant and represent a variety of topics. We all learn from each other, and I often learn new things based on questions from all of you!
If you have an AMA question, please email it to [email protected]. Make sure you include the phrase INSIDERS AMA in the subject line so I can collate and read all your submissions.
From Brenda
Q. My combi-steam oven (V-Zug) has a regeneratomatic function for crispy and moist reheating of food. It’s supposed to be able to judge the food and determine it for itself, but I find the results very variable and not suggestive of anything automated. Do you have any advice for reheating different food types in a combi-steam oven? Am I best to just use the regenerate option (not automated) which I also have as a function?
A: I always recommend getting to know the manual settings for your oven, so you can control exactly what’s going on with your food. Particularly, as in this case, when you’ve found the auto settings don’t really do what you were hoping for.
The most comprehensive details I’ve written on reheating are in this (Insiders only) article – if you haven’t seen it before, I recommend a read and also that you download the printable chart within it. It should help with most reheating questions but if there’s anything it doesn’t answer feel free to email and I’ll try to help you out further!
From Patricia
Q: While we still have a few weeks left of local eggplants in farm stands, I would love to perfect a steam oven sous vide version of an eggplant steak. I enjoyed such an entree at a restaurant recently, and it had to be sous vide: perfect meaty texture then pan seared for a little crust and a light tomato kissed sauce. Soooo good.
I searched your site and found the stuffed eggplant, and I’ve used my convection steam oven to melt the eggplant for baba ganoush with great results. I would just like direction on how to use the oven for sous vide eggplant without a bag, if that’s something you have tried.
A: I haven’t actually tried eggplant sous vide, would you believe?! But I love it, and I do have ‘eggplant recipes’ noted in my long list of content to create so I think there’ll have to be an eggplant Insiders issue pretty soon.
In the meantime, I know for sure that you can steam slices of salted eggplant until they’re tender (talking about 212°F/100°C and 100% steam here, so not sous vide temps). Then dry extremely well on paper towels, season, oil and sear in a blazing hot pan or on a grill. I think that would get you close to the dish you’re describing.
If you wanted to experiment with sous vide, my first approach would be something like 185°F/85°C and 100% steam for 1-2 hours. Same finishing as for the steamed version, but the texture of the eggplant is likely to be a little more meaty than with the higher temp steaming. I would love to know if you try this; eggplants are out of season here but I’ll definitely give it more attention when I can reliably get hold of them!
From Kimi
Q: Steaming rice and lentils, quinoa, etc. usually has you spread the item out on the sheet pan and then add the appropriate amount of water/broth. I wonder if you can use a more traditionally-proportioned dish like a cylindrical pyrex dish or something? On some nights depending on what I’m combining in the cook, it would be useful to have the rice contained in a dish so that I can put another item next to it to cook at the same time. Is there some steam-oven magic to having the dried grain/bean spread out for cooking?
A: Yes, you can use other shaped vessels to steam. I tend to stick to the lightweight, shallow stainless steel ‘gastronorm’ pans because I have several sizes and they’re just such fast heat conductors. Be aware that things like pyrex/glass/ceramic are slow heat conductors and I’ve found rice in particular to be less reliably even when steamed in those.
In your example, if you don’t make the rice and water too deep within your container you should be ok (as in, don’t try this approach with grains or pulses that are four inches deep in a pot or pan!). You’ll likely need an extra few minutes cooking to allow for the thicker and less heat-conductive walls of the vessel to heat up.