Christmas side dish

Honey Roast Parsnips: Crisp Outside, Soft Inside, Never Burnt

The whole trick is timing. Honey goes on at the end, not the start: roast the parsnips in hot oil until they are tender and just colouring, then toss them in honey for the final ten minutes. Put the honey on at the beginning and the sugars burn before the middle softens. No parboiling, 200 degrees, 35 minutes in total. Here is the recipe, then the reasons it works.

Why the honey goes on last

A parsnip is a starchy root that caramelises on its own; honey is 60 g or more of fructose and glucose per 100 g, both of them sugars that brown fast at roasting heat. Put the two together from cold and the honey hits 200 degrees long before the inside of the baton reaches 90, so the outside blackens while the centre is still raw and squeaky. Roasting in oil first does the cooking. The honey, added when the parsnips are already tender, needs only eight to ten minutes to form a thin, lacquered coat.

This matters more than it sounds for the colour. The Food Standards Agency lists roasted potatoes and root vegetables among the foods in which acrylamide forms, and its home-cooking advice is specific:

Late honey is the easiest way to obey that rule and still get the sticky edges people want. Early honey makes the dark, almost burnt tips that look dramatic in photographs and taste bitter on the plate. We would rather you had golden.

Which honey, and why we do not use a delicate one

We roast parsnips with 해바라기 꿀. It is naturally high in glucose, which is why it sets to a firm, pale, almost fudgy jar within weeks of harvest: honeys with a low fructose-to-glucose ratio granulate fast (Kolayli and colleagues, Sugars in Honey, Royal Society of Chemistry, 2012). In the tray that glucose is an advantage. It browns readily, it tastes of caramel and dried apricot rather than flowers, and it does not get lost against mustard and thyme. A set jar is not a problem; twenty seconds of warming makes it pourable, and 결정화된 꿀 is the same honey in a different shape. The full flavour profile of sunflower honey explains why it suits roasting better than the breakfast table.

What we avoid: a light, floral honey such as 아카시아, which is wonderful on yoghurt and simply vanishes in a hot oven. If you want to know how the six honeys divide into cooking honeys and spooning honeys, 생꿀의 종류 sets them side by side.

Buy them after the first frost

The best parsnips of the year arrive in December, and the reason is in the root, not the recipe. A study of parsnips in long-term cold storage found that starch fell sharply in the first month and was almost entirely converted to sucrose by the second, with the authors concluding that this “accumulation of sucrose may raise the culinary quality of cold-stored parsnip” (Ilic and Sunic, Acta Horticulturae, 2015). Growers have always known the field version of this: a parsnip lifted after a hard frost is sweeter than one lifted in October.

In our family’s village the parsnips were left in the ground until they were needed, under straw once the snow came, and dug for the Christmas table. In a British supermarket in December you are buying the same effect, so there is less need for honey than in a November recipe. Two tablespoons for a kilo is plenty; we have seen recipes with four, and they taste of honey, not parsnip.

Parboil or not?

Half the recipes online parboil, half do not, and both camps are right about their own parsnips. The decision depends on size.

Three ways to change the glaze

• Honey, mustard and thyme. The version above. The mustard seeds pop slightly in the heat and cut the sweetness.
• Honey, orange and cumin. Swap the mustard for the zest of an orange and a teaspoon of toasted cumin seeds. Warmer and better with lamb or a nut roast.
• Honey, chilli and sesame. A tablespoon of 뜨거운 꿀 in place of plain, and sesame seeds in the last five minutes. Boxing Day parsnips, with cold ham.

Ahead, leftovers and who gets them

Parsnips can be roasted to the end of step 3 up to a day ahead, cooled and refrigerated, then honeyed and finished from cold in 15 minutes at 200. Leftovers keep two days in the fridge; they are better reheated in a hot oven than a microwave, which softens the glaze into syrup. An 80 g serving counts as one of the five portions of fruit and vegetables the NHS recommends each day, and unlike potatoes, parsnips do count (NHS, 5 A Day portion sizes). Three heaped tablespoons is the portion the NHS gives for cooked vegetables.

If there is a baby at the table, set some parsnips aside before the honey goes on. The NHS is clear that honey should not be given to a child until they are over one year old, because it can occasionally contain bacteria that cause infant botulism (NHS, 영유아에게 먹이지 말아야 할 음식). Plain roast parsnip, cooled and cut small, is a good weaning food; the honeyed ones are for everyone else.

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