Common problems & how to solve them Healthy Cooking Made Easy with BBC Good Food
There are one or two things that can go wrong when cooking a traybake like this. Let’s look at a couple of them…
Ingredients burnt and stuck to the tray
There are a number of explanations for this – perhaps the oven temperature was too hot? If you have a fan-assisted oven the temperature should be 180C rather than 200C. Was your baking tray very shallow causing the ingredients to cook much faster? Perhaps your tray had a large surface area, which meant you needed a little more oil for the ingredients to cook without sticking – this is likely if your tray hasn’t got a non-stick coating.
Ingredients did not caramelise
The beauty of a traybake is that the method of roasting ingredients creates browning of the sausages and caramelisation of the vegetable’s natural sugars. If this fails to happen your oven may not have been hot enough during the first 20 minutes of cooking time – did you preheat the oven?
Another reason may be that your tray or baking dish was too small and didn’t allow enough room between the ingredients. Or perhaps you added the stock too early? This would mean your vegetables would stew rather than roast.
Always check your oven is the right temperature, if you have any doubt about this it’s worth investing in an oven thermometer just to check. Use a suitable baking tray or dish – one that will allow space between the ingredients and measure liquids carefully with a proper measuring jug.
Traybake was too salty
It’s always best to taste as you go and add more seasoning before serving if you feel the dish needs it. We’ve added salt at the outset to encourage the vegetables to caramelise – when cooking our curry, that a little salt draws moisture from the onion and helps it cook? Our traybake includes ingredients that are salty – the sausages, the pesto and the stock, so it’s unlikely you’ll need to add much more.