How to Confit Vegetables
Cooking with fat, the vegan way
Fat rules. It makes food comforting, rich, balanced. Tender, crisp, caramelized, delicious. Watching Samin Nosrat’s exquisite series Salt Fat Acid Heat affirmed this long-held fixation of mine — fat is crucial to cooking.
I’m happiest when there are rivers of olive oil running through my food. A drizzle of earthy peanut oil, a toasty bead of sesame oil, a creamy spoonful of coconut oil. Dripping off sun-dried tomatoes, or the glossy coating on salad leaves. The way it pools invitingly in a jar of homemade nut butter, or emulsifies cooperatively in a cake batter.
And then there’s one of the best ways to wallow in the wonders of oil — confit. This traditional French process is a preservation method, where food is cooked submerged in fat very slowly and then stored, still submerged, until required. Although it’s generally associated with meat preservation, there’s no reason why you can’t apply the same idea to vegetables that you want to eat with relative immediacy.
It’s very easy — simply cover your vegetables in enough olive oil to completely immerse them, and place them in a low-temp oven for about an hour. The result is twofold: vegetables which taste as though they were cooked by the angels themselves, and the remaining, drained-off oil, now infused with whatever was…
