The gap between restaurant vegetables and home vegetables is wider than the gap in almost any other category, and people generally attribute it to fat. More butter, more oil, more cream.

There is some truth in that and it is not the main thing. The main things are three techniques that are perfectly available at home and that home cooks skip for understandable reasons.

They cook in much smaller batches

A restaurant cooks a portion of vegetables for one table. A home cook cooks vegetables for four people at once, in one pan.

That difference is enormous and it explains most of the outcome.

A small quantity in a hot pan browns. A large quantity in the same pan drops the temperature, releases water faster than it evaporates, and steams. The result is soft, pale and flat regardless of what you do afterwards.

The fix at home is to cook in batches, which everybody knows and nobody does because it is tedious and the first batch goes cold.

The workable compromise is a much bigger pan than feels necessary, or an oven, which has enough surface area for a whole tray.

They season in layers

Home seasoning tends to be a single event, usually at the end, sometimes at the start.

Professional practice is to season at each stage. Salt when the vegetable goes in. Adjust partway. Adjust at the end. Sometimes a finishing salt on the plate.

The reason this matters is that salt added at different points does different things. Early salt draws out moisture and seasons from within. Late salt sits on the surface and reads as brighter and sharper.

A dish seasoned only at the end tastes salted rather than seasoned, which is a difference you can perceive without being able to name it.

They finish with something the recipe does not mention

Almost every plate that leaves a professional kitchen gets something at the last moment.

A squeeze of acid. A knob of butter or a spoon of good oil swirled in off the heat. Fresh herbs. A crunchy element. Something with texture and something with brightness.

These finishes are rarely written into recipes because they are assumed and because they vary. They are also a large fraction of why the food tastes finished rather than merely cooked.

Home cooks tend to serve directly from the pan at the moment the cooking is done. Adding thirty seconds of finishing to that produces a disproportionate improvement.

The fat point, fairly stated

Restaurants do use more fat. That is true and it is worth being clear about what it does.

Fat carries flavour compounds that water does not, so a dish with more fat delivers more of its own flavour to you. It also improves texture and mouthfeel in ways that are difficult to replace.

The quantity in a restaurant vegetable dish would surprise most people. Not the cream, which is obvious, but the butter finished into things that do not look rich.

At home the reasonable position is somewhere in between, and specifically to use fat where it does the most work — at the finish rather than at the start — where a smaller amount is more noticeable.

What restaurants do that you should not copy

Blanching everything in advance and reheating to order. This is a service necessity and it costs quality. Home cooks have the advantage of cooking things once and serving them immediately, and should use it.

Excessive salt in some kitchens, calibrated for food eaten with alcohol in a loud room.

And the equipment-dependent techniques — very high heat, salamanders, blast chillers — which are not reproducible and not worth chasing.

The one change with the biggest return

If I had to pick one, it would be the pan size and the batch size.

More than technique, more than seasoning, more than fat, the reason home vegetables are soft and pale is that too many of them are in too small a pan.

Buying one pan considerably larger than seems sensible, or using a full oven tray, changed my vegetables more than everything else combined.

It is an unglamorous answer, which is probably why it does not appear in the articles about restaurant secrets.

Timing the serve

The last difference, and the one home cooks are best placed to exploit.

Restaurant food travels from pan to table in under a minute. Home food frequently sits while something else finishes, and vegetables deteriorate faster than almost anything else in that window.

Anything green loses colour within a few minutes of being cooked. Anything crisp softens as its own steam condenses on it.

Which argues for cooking the vegetable last rather than first, even though the instinct is to get it out of the way. Everything else on a plate tolerates a few minutes of waiting better than the vegetable does.

Changing the order of my cooking, so that the greens go on when everything else is already plated, made a bigger difference than any technique on this list.