It’s pretty much understood (in Western cuisine, anyway), that you preheat your oven before putting inside whatever you’re going to bake. But are there any foodstuffs where starting in a cold oven somehow produces a desired final product?
I have a pound cake recipe, loftily titled Elvis Presley’s Favorite Pound Cake, that is baked starting in a cold oven. It’s a fabulous pound cake, so no argument from me on the desired final product!
I have seen some advice to cook bacon starting in a cold oven. That allows a little more time for the fat to render before the bacon gets overcooked.
Alton Brown’s Standing Rib Roast calls for starting from a cold oven.
Although recipes say to preheat the oven, it’s often not necessary. But without basing the recipe off a preheated oven, the recipe writer can’t give a reliable length of time needed for baking/roasting in the instructions.
Pretty much anything “low and slow” can be started in a cold oven.
I certainly put baking potatoes into a cold over every time. It takes my oven 17 minutes to get to 400, I’m not wasting all that energy on something that doesn’t need any level of precision about cooking time. The size of the potatoes and even how much moisture they have in them is going to matter a lot more than if they are in an oven for 10 minutes between 200 and 400 degrees.
As I understand it, gas ovens reach working temperature in a minute or two; electric ovens take much longer.
I have always had a gas oven and never, ever bothered to preheat it.
However, that would probably need doing if you’re making Baked Alaska.
Which I never have.
Mine is 10 - 12 minutes.
I’ve grown up with and owned nothing but gas ovens, and, yes, closer to ten minutes is right. One or two minutes would be amazing!
Same here. It takes my gas oven about 10 minutes to come to temp (give or take).
The burners on the stovetop are instant.
B. Dylan Hollis discusses a cold oven cake recipe he tried, and then re-did with a pre-heated oven. He found the cold oven approach to work better for this cake.
Gas oven.
Rarely preheat more than 4 min.
My cornbread comes out the same no matter.
Mid-dau has no trouble putting her couple of casseroles into a cold oven.
A ham does great in a cold oven and cooked low and slow.
Is a cold oven necessary for a good result or is it that there is no difference?
I find when I bake cookies a preheated oven is necessary.
One way to cook an eye round roast is to put it in a pan on a piece of foil large enough to wrap it up, then put in a cold oven set 425°F. When the oven comes to temperature wrap the foil around the roast, turn the oven off and let it sit for something minutes per pound before checking the temperature and continued cooking at lower temperatures if necessary. I did try this, but set the oven down to 250° and waited for the oven to start heating again before checking the temperature of the meat.
It does fairly well for an eye round which is not a very tender cut of meat. However, I’m not sure that starting with a cold oven makes much difference. The initial high heat before wrapping the foil around the meat serves to brown it a bit but I think just a little time in a preheated oven will take care of that. So it saves 10 minutes or so of preheat time and the time it would take to brown the roast in a hot oven, but otherwise not that much of an advantage.
For science I just checked on my year old, high end gas oven. It took just shy of eleven minutes to reach 400F.
When I do baked/boiled eggs I start them in a cold oven. Set it for 350 and leave them for 30 minutes. Then I take them out and shock them in cold water. Works every time and the shells just fall off of them.
Cookies tend to have short bake times. If starting from a cold oven, your first batch would require a longer bake time and you’d likely have to check them, often, to determine when they were ready to remove. The first batch of my benne wafer Rx would not fare well if allowed to thaw slowly in the warming oven; they want to be cooked hot and quick to be nice and crisp without turning to “puddles” on the cookie sheet.
Some Rxs really don’t like being heated at a lower temperature as the leavening agents start to act before their consequences (CO2 production) can be locked into the final product, leaving you with a heavier, “flatter” end result.
But, for “cooking”, there’s rarely a downside; I can toss chicken parmigiana in the oven reasonably “cold” (turn on oven, arrange raw chicken pieces in baking dish, add sauce, transfer to oven) and just know that it will be a longer interval before I need to take it out, flip the chicken pieces and finish adding ingredients before reinserting. If the oven was TOO slow to come up to temperature, then the chicken would risk drying out before cooking properly.
Ditto frozen fish, roasts, lasagna, etc.
I wouldn’t risk experimenting with a bread Rx, coffee cake, etc. – things where the bake time determined previously is critical to the outcome.
In a conventional household oven radiative heat transfer is the dominant mode of energy transfer. So it is the temperature of the walls that matters most. Even using a fan forced oven the convective transfer is less than the radiative transfer. So a properly up to temperature oven is when the walls, not just the internal gas is at the desired temperature.
After that, all cooking is a matter of heat transfer. Much of what we like from an oven is dependant upon a gradient of temperatures through the baked item. We get the centre up to a temperature where cooking just occurs, and the outside is past just cooking and well into proper chemical processes eg. Maillard Reaction.
That works best with an already hot oven. Serious radiative transfer over hot coals is why we like to cook meat over them. Same thing, but dialled up a notch or two.
Anything that needs the entire body to reach a lower cooking temperature, without much surface reaction is probably better suited to starting low. So low and slow, or for chicken, where you really do mean the inside to be properly cooked, that might also be a good answer.
It always reminds me of heat treating metals. How you can get very sophisticated hardening and tempering of tools with the right rates of heat transfer in both heating and cooling.
Yes, though I would do this in a skillet on the stove top. Esp when starting with frozen bacon (we eat it seldom enough that we divide a purchased pound into thirds, wrap each third and freeze for later use) where it takes some time for the strips to thaw enough to be separated in the skillet.
[IMHO, bacon should always be cooked slow so it gets a chance to sit iin that deadly liquified fat for the longest time!!]
[[“Mmmm… bacon” – Homer Simpson]]
Bacon tends to curl less when started cold, thus improving even cooking. I don’t think I’ve started oven bacon cold just pan fried. But I don’t think it matters so much because bacon is not something that needs precise temperatures, it’s sort of a “cook until done to your preference” kind of thing.