Here's Why Your Sheet Pan Dinners Are Cooking So Unevenly
There was a time when sheet pan dinners were the height of lazy home cooking or meal prep time saving, and perhaps they still are. However, tossing a bunch of raw ingredients on a pan and into the oven won't guarantee you the tasty meal you're imagining.
If you've ever tried to cook a sheet pan meal and wound up with burnt bell peppers and undercooked potatoes, there's a reason for that: Not every food cooks at the same temperature or time. Which means you'll have to do some adjusting to ensure your sheet pan dinner cooks evenly. For example, you may want to cut those potatoes down to small, diced pieces, so they can cook faster.
One of the many upsides to sheet pan dinners are that you can cook a variety of ingredients at once. You can make anything from a casserole to a dump cake for an easy, one pan weeknight meal. Getting all the food in your pan to cook evenly is not impossible. Just follow these tips to get it right.
How to evenly cook food in a sheet pan
Cutting thicker foods with longer cooking times (like potatoes or a thick chicken breast) into smaller pieces is just one of the ways to better ensure your food cooks evenly in a sheet pan. Another method to ensure an even cook, can be to stagger cooking times.
This method is a bit more labor intensive than just throwing everything in at once, but timing is always key when it comes to cooking. With this in mind, you could make a tasty pan of chicken and vegetables by cooking the chicken for a while and then putting whole asparagus pieces on the pan for the last few minutes at a high temperature.
Your sheet pan dinner could also be cooking unevenly because of overcrowding. As awesome as it is that you can cook a whole fajita dinner in one pan, an overcrowded pan can lead to dried out, burnt skirt steak and half cooked bell peppers. Skirt steak is the best cut for making fajitas, but it's also a thin cut. This means the steak will cook quickly and the bell peppers might not cook through if they're being blocked from the heat of the oven by other ingredients.