When it goes wrong · Roast
Burnt outside, raw inside.
Can you save it?
Reviewed for this symptom
Cover with foil, drop the oven and let the interior catch up; the crust is as dark as it will be. Check the centre with a thermometer or a skewer before serving.
Safety boundary: Serve meat only once the centre has reached its safe temperature; crust colour is not evidence.
How to confirm the diagnosis
Observable cues, not inferred user state
- Dark crust over a raw centre
- The piece is large
- The oven ran hot throughout
Not this?
- Vegetables are soft and pale rather than browned.
- Meat is evenly grey from edge to centre.
- Nothing browns even on an empty tray.
What actually happened
Only this symptom
Oven too hot for the thickness. Large pieces need lower heat and longer, or a hot start followed by a lower finish.
The full mechanism
Shared by every roast failure
Dry air is a poor conductor of heat compared with water or metal, which is why an oven at 200°C does not cook nearly as fast as boiling water at 100°C. That poor conduction is the point: it lets the surface reach browning temperature — above roughly 150°C — while the interior climbs slowly enough to finish at the same time. Two things spoil it. Moisture is the first: any water on the surface, or steam trapped by crowding or a lid, holds the surface at 100°C and it cannot brown until that water has gone. Contact is the second: a hot tray transfers heat far faster than the air does, so the underside browns hardest, and food touching its neighbours has no exposed surface between them and steams in the gap. This is why roasting is the technique most improved by using a bigger tray.
The full Roast lesson — how to tell, where to practise it, what it carries to.
Next time
Prevent this specific failure
Lower heat and longer for large pieces, or a hot start followed by a lower finish.
What right looks like
Shared by every roast failure
- Pieces sizzle audibly when the tray is opened; silence means the oven has lost temperature or the tray is crowded.
- The undersides are darkest, because that is where conduction rather than convection is doing the work.
- Fat has rendered and pooled rather than sitting white on the surface.
- For meat, the only reliable doneness signal is internal temperature — colour tells you about the surface and nothing about the middle.