Testing Chef roles and environments

I'm new to Chef and have been using Test Kitchen to test the validity of my cookbooks, which works great. Now I'm trying to ensure that environment-specific attributes are correct on production nodes prior to running Chef initially. These would be defined in a role.

For example, I may have recipes that converge using a Vagrant box with dev settings, which validates the cookbook. I want to be able to test that a production node's role. I think I want these tests as the source of truth describing my environment. Looking at Test Kitchen's documentation, this seems beyond its scope.

Is my assumption correct? Is there a better approach to test a cookbook before the first time Chef is run on a production node to ensure it has the correct settings?