The Veggie Charring Method That Seriously Cuts Down Prep Time

What's your favorite way to get in your Centers for Disease Control-recommended 2 to 3 cups of vegetables per day (via CDC)? Perhaps you throw together a big, leafy salad; Maybe you grind your greens down in a blender for a long, tall juice; Heck, perhaps you even take your veggies in dessert form, such as by making a sweet potato pie or a lusciously frosted carrot cake.

But we're willing to bet that if you like cooking, charring and roasting your vegetables is a common way you prepare them. As we all know, cooking veggies over high heat until charred can impart sweet and even meaty flavors to the produce (via The Taste Workshop), adding delightful layers of complexity to bell peppers, summer squash, eggplant, and plenty of other vegetables. Charred vegetables are also subtly smoky, bringing a depth of flavor to salsa, steak sauce, and other yummy kitchen preparations. 

But how do you char just a few veggies at a time if you don't feel like lighting up your grill? That's where a kitchen torch comes in.

If you've ever made crème brûlée — that classic French custard with a caramelized, cracked-sugar lid — at home, you've likely had to purchase a special piece of equipment for that final sugar-burning step: a kitchen torch. A small, butane-powered torch that's effective at directing a blast of heat at items such as those crème brûlées as well as meringues and even casseroles (via Delighted Cooking), this handy tool is a great one to have in your arsenal for charring vegetables, as well.

The Takeout explains that a kitchen torch can be a faster way to charred vegetable goodness when employed in tandem with your stovetop burner. The outlet recommends taking a bell pepper, for example, and charring it right over the burner; As one side of the pepper is exposed to the burner, you can use the torch to char the other side. As you rotate the pepper over the flame, the torch can spot-treat any areas that didn't char yet, taking you to roasted pepper land — and subsequent destinations of salsa, romesco sauce, and pimento cheese — that much faster.