I don’t know if I’m thinking about this correctly, but let’s say I want to bake 20 chicken nuggets in the oven. If I put all 20 in at the same time, I assume I’d have to set the timer longer because there’s more mass to transfer the heat into?
But if I only put 10 in, no doubt some of the heat is escaping through the oven glass and such. Would the additional 10 nuggets help capture some of this escaping heat, thereby increasing efficiency?
I don’t know how to sort this out in my head…
you will have a massive heat loss when you extract the 10 and replace it with 10.
far better to cook the 20.
You can’t just try an experiment?
You mean a regular oven, not a microwave?
Under normal cooking conditions the number of items shouldn’t make a functional difference.
Frying it’s better to cook a few at a time because the oil will cool if you add too many frozen chicken nuggets. You’ll get greasy, yucky chicken nuggets.
Baking - is the reverse. you lose your heat opening the oven. Cook a big batch at a time.
This is largely dependent on the oven and the difference in mass, but I can tell you that this is certainly not true in most cases.
Bake a dozen muffins at once, then do 2 dozen at once. You don’t double the time, but it definitely takes longer for it to cook. The laws of thermodynamics require it, as you need more energy to raise the temperature of 24 items by 100 degrees than you do to raise 12 items of the same individual mass.
Where the difference becomes more negligible might be in something like a large production oven that has a good deal of built-in thermal mass in the walls, etc, to keep the temperature relatively constant. The small difference in mass in an oven that’s the height of a full grown man will be negligible there.
I won’t doubt your individual experience, but as I am a frequent baker and have baked in lots of different ovens, I have never seen any appreciable difference between baking one loaf of bread vs two, a batch of mini-muffins vs 24 regular ones, three pies at Thanksgiving vs one etc. I approach baking as if I was working in my lab, with careful timing, using thermometers etc and have never seen this. I did specify “normal baking conditions” to rule out cases where you’ve stuffed your oven full of pans.
Certainly for one baking pan with 10 vs 20 nuggets on it it shouldn’t make an appreciable difference.
There will be an increase in cooking time for a larger batch, but it’s far less than splitting the batch in hald and cooking each separately.
Just took a look in the freezer, and I’ve got a bag of frozen french fries that says to cook half a bag for 21-29 minutes or three quarters of a bag at 25-35 minutes. No directions for a full bag.
You want the OP to write and submit a grant for funding, or were you thinking more along the lines of a kickstarter campaign?
Right, but unless I misunderstand the general principles governing ovens, wouldn’t adding another pan of muffins simply mean the oven has to turn the flame on or activate the electric coil twice as often to maintain the temperature?
This has not been my experience, either–and I do a LOT of baking.
If there’s a difference in time at all, it’s on the order of half a minute or so for the oven to reach temperature. Ovens work by turning on a heating element until an internal temperature is reached, then turning it off until it drops below a certain threshold, and repeating – pretty much the same as any thermostat driven appliance. I can see a larger batch requiring more energy input (i.e. the element has to stay in “produce heat” mode for a larger part of its cycle), but once the internal temperature is at the specified value, it’s going to cook everything exposed to it equally fast.
Curious, I went to Peapod.com to check out frozen french fries and nuggets cooking instructions. Ore-Ida brand fries do seem to specify different cooking times, but other brands (McCain, Alexia) don’t. None of the nuggets I looked at had varying cooking times listed.
More in the meta-analysis mood today 
Yeah, the oven is going to maintain the same temperature no matter what you put into it. Or at least, it’s going to try to, but you’re almost certainly not going to be able to put in enough to overwhelm its ability to do so.
When you put enough food in the oven to cause the temperature to drop, the thermostat will detect this and cause the oven to bring its temperature back up to the set point. This usually happens pretty quickly.
An oven (a good one, anyway) is designed to have a high thermal mass relative to the food that’s likely to be cooked in it. That is, a normal amount of food won’t cause the temperature to drop very much. As others have pointed out, opening the oven door causes a greater temperature drop. When you consider the thermal mass of the oven, the difference between 10 and 20 chicken nuggets isn’t significant.
Here’s a thought experiment: how much longer would it take to cook two chicken nuggets versus one nugget? How about half a chicken nugget versus a whole one? With amounts this small, it’s pretty easy to see that there wouldn’t be a significant difference in cooking time.
On the other hand, it would take more time to cook a thousand nuggets (if you could fit them) - this amount of food would cause the oven’s temperature to drop enough that it would take a while for it to get back to the set point. This would only happen if you really overwhelmed the oven.
All of this agrees with my experience (and with that of several others who have posted replies). Baking times don’t change much with the amount of food you put in the oven.
An increase in mass would matter if it was a question of increasing the size of the items rather than the number of them. As in, if you poured enough cake batter for two layers into a single pan (like a bundt cake pan) you will have to bake it longer. And, conversely, 12 cupcakes cook faster than a single cake layer. And a two pound meatloaf takes longer than two separate one pounders.
In that case, it’s a question of how long it takes for the heat to penetrated through the item, nothing to do with the oven’s capacity.
Exactly right. Putting 20 nuggets in will require more energy to cook, but that just means that the oven’s heating elements will cycle on slightly more often to supply that heat as it loses it to the nuggets and its thermostat kicks it back on. Cooking ten at a time, even a well-insulated oven is going to lose more heat to its environment during the longer cook time than it would spend on heating the extra ten nuggets in one go, even neglecting the loss from the open door while taking the first ten out and putting the next ten in.
Is it an electric oven or a gas oven?
Maybe the OP doesn’t want to eat 40 nuggets in one night?
It’s like the Paleo Cool Hand Luke… only with barbecue sauce.
“Now I want you to get mad at them nuggets!”