When did we become afraid of a recipe longer than three steps? These recipes are popular, but I don’t need a cookbook to tell me to put pesto on salmon, argues Sophie Morris
Was there a traybake tipping point, a moment when every weekday meal metamorphosed into a one-dish oven bake? I’m as lazy and time-poor as the rest of the human race, and we all want quick midweek dinners.
But should everything be a traybake or one pot? Isn’t there something in the joy of cooking that’s connected to taking pleasure in the activity itself - chopping, slicing, stirring, tasting? Is there something, dare I say it, infantile about being afraid of a recipe with more than three steps?
Overtly simple recipes such as traybakes have commandeered the cookbook market. Even Jamie Oliver’s on board. He’s dedicated an entire chapter - “Trusty Traybakes” - to the genre in his new release Simply Jamie (Michael Joseph, £30). I’m into the idea of his chicken baked in bread sauce with bacon, but I don’t need a cookbook to tell me to put pesto on a piece of salmon (to be fair the book is billed as being simple).
Nor am I sure why Oliver (inset) calls his tuna pasta bake a “cheat’s tuna pasta bake” that “breaks all the rules” when it’s a recipe millions of households make a version of regularly. I guess the only rulebreaking part is that he’s transformed using a tin of soup as a sauce into a Jamie payday.
Traybakes are emerging as surefire paydays for many cookbook authors in the era of fuss-free food. Even online “chef collective” Mob has devoted its forthcoming book, Mob One (out 31 October, Ebury Press, £26) to one-dish dinners, whether one pot, one-pan, or one-tray - such as bacon and hot honey sheet pancakes and smoky cod traybake tacos.
“No one needs a blowtorch to make a good dinner,” it tells readers, and while I largely agree, is it too much to ask for a bit of variation? Are traybakes proper cooking? We run the risk of losing other cooking skills if all we do is throw things into a single oven dish.
“All the feedback from users is that they want super-highconvenience food without the faff of dealing with lots of washing up,” says Mob founder Ben Lebus, who began his cooking channel for students back in 2016 and now has 2.6 million followers on Instagram and 1.4 million on TikTok for the brand. His audience has grown with him into the late twenties/ early thirties age bracket, young professionals and families.
Rukmini Iyer is known for sending the traybake craze stellar with her Roasting Tin series, which includes green, quick, global and sweet variations on the theme, and has sold 1.75 million copies since 2017. You either own one or know a fan, and they’re the ideal gift for a new parent.
“I got the idea from my late first husband, Ken,” explains Iyer. “We had a new oven and he asked me what he could make in it. I realised that I was making more and more stovetop dishes - curries, chillies etc - without stirring, by chucking the ingredients in a tin in the oven. The first book proposal was born as his answer.”
Why are we so obsessed with them? Unsurprisingly, it’s the failsafe combo of speed and ease. “I wanted a flavourpacked home-cooked dinner without having to stand and stir,” says Iyer. “Five to 10 minutes’ light chopping, then being able to sit down while the oven did the work felt like a concept that would resonate with other home cooks.”
Iyer’s 2024 publication, The Green Cookbook (Square Peg, £25), isn’t just oven bakes. She has strayed from that concept to write recipes that are even more cost-, timeand fuel-efficient, inspired by the needs of her two young daughters - sometimes we’re too lazy or timepoor even for the traybake.
“A good Roasting Tin dish takes at least 20 minutes. Sometimes you need dinner quicker,” she says, claiming her miso butter noodles with tomatoes and spring onions comes in at seven minutes.
Lebus lets slip that Mob’s most popular dish ever, sausage gochujang rigatoni, asks for two pans, with the pasta boiled in a separate pan to the sauce. Hard or overcooked pasta is an issue that comes up over and over as one of the drawbacks of oven bakes. “You’ve got to be really careful around quantities on the pasta side,” he admits. “It’s easy to add too much liquid, or not enough.”
Iyer says she chooses ingredients that will cook at the same time, such as big starchy veg, like squash, celeriac and sweet potatoes, with chicken or sausages, and tomatoes, peppers or fennel with fish.
“I’ll occasionally write a recipe that involves opening the oven door just once to add something,” she admits. “But only if it’ll really pay off - it’s got to be maximum flavour, minimum effort.”
As it happens, Jamie, the Roasting Tin series and Mob have a common denominator, the food photographer David Loftus. In an era driven by shared visuals, it’s possible their photographic makeover is the secret to this era of traybake tyranny. An otherwise boring-looking dinner has been transformed by clever chefs and stylists - and Loftus.
“I wanted the covers and recipe images in the book to reflect the simplicity of the dishes - colourful, but achievable,” says Iyer.
“You eat with your eyes, so the elements that make each dish interesting to eat - rainbow vegetables, a scatter of herbs, nuts, pomegranate seeds - also make them look lovely on the page.”
Upmarket social content adds to this effect; recipe reels are so slick and engaging that they not only make all recipes look achievable within the length of the reel, they also sneakily steal our cooking time.
I remember a former colleague telling me how much she looked forward to following recipes each evening because nothing - as in no meddling superiors - could get between her and the list of instructions. Even better, the resulting dish was something she could be proud of having created, from start to finish.
Throw-it-in-a-tin dinners might be great for feeding people, but they undo the enduring satisfaction of having followed a recipe and cooked something wonderful.