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This question is inspired by this week's cooking of a 3kg (estimate - it was plenty huge and took 6 people to eat) courgette / zucchini. The 'quote' is a digression about what happened - skip it if you will).

I had created two 'boats' to stuff: the 'hull' was about 2 cm thick.

My guesstimate at how long it should cook was 30 minutes at 160C, and then check.

In the end I used about 20 minutes at 160, 10 minutes at 180, and 10 minutes at oven full blast (~260). You can probably tell it wasn't cooking fast enough and I just wanted to pump in heat at some point.

I started with visual inspection to see whether it was cooking well: at some point I decided to stick my digital probe in the 'hull'. The temperature was 82C when I pulled it out of the oven: this produced a good result.

My question: can you determine how well a vegetable is cooked (in the oven) through this type of probe use, and what temperature should a vegetable reach (a table would be ideal, but any answer's welcome).

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    I have a difficult time imagining that a perfect chart could be created, as everyone seems to have a preferred definition of "done" for each vegetable and even per cooking technique. For example, my done on most vegetables is crispier than a lot of people prefer.
    – justkt
    Commented Aug 31, 2010 at 13:03
  • I think your intuition about how soft it should feel when you poke it, thermometer or not, is probably pretty good; "until barely firm" is a much easier and safer directive for zucchini than for meat. But I'm still curious!
    – Cascabel ♦
    Commented Aug 31, 2010 at 13:04
  • @justkt - rare, medium, well done vegetables? If there can be a accepted range for steak....
    – Tobias Op Den Brouw
    Commented Sep 1, 2010 at 7:29
  • hm...that could work...interesting idea.
    – justkt
    Commented Sep 1, 2010 at 14:04

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The typical sous vide temperature for most vegetables is right around 82-83 C, so I think you nailed it. Of course it is much more difficult to reach a consistent temperature in the oven than sous vide, but the texture at a given temperature should be roughly equivalent.

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  • +1 Awesome. I'm going to see if any other answers come up, but that's a great match. Is there a sous vide veg temp list anywhere?
    – Tobias Op Den Brouw
    Commented Sep 1, 2010 at 7:30

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