When a baked recipe has a prep time of more than 15 minutes, why do a lot of people list the oven temperature at the beginning? I’m not going to waste gas by letting my oven sit empty at full temperature for a half hour or more while I chop vegetables or mix cookies. I’d consider it far more useful to have the preheat time inserted into the recipe at about the time it’d be most useful to start preheating at.
Do these people really let their oven sit around on for that long, or are they just lazy about where to put the oven temperature in the recipe? If so, why don’t they put it at the end, instead?
When do you start preheating your oven?
I could understand starting the preheating at the beginning if you have a baking stone. But how many people have those?
Preheating an oven can effect baked items like cakes, cornbread etc. I don’t know the chemistry but I’ve been told the hot oven effects how the batter starts cooking.
A lot of frozen foods like Stouffers says to preheat. Then even say not to remove the product from the freezer prior to cooking. They want it going straight into a hot oven. WAG slow defrosting could make the food soggy or watery?
Also, frozen food in a cold oven would slow down how long it takes the oven to get hot. You got blocks of ice in there.
Have I ever put a frozen pizza in a cold oven? Yes. But normally I preheat.
Some ovens take longer to preheat than others. Some people are quicker cookie-mixers than others. Is it really so terrible that the recipe writers are letting people figure the timing out on their own? There’s no way to insert it in the “right” spot.
Not everyone’s oven works consistently. I can turn it on, and it will take anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour to heat up. If I used it more, I’d get it fixed.
I was under the impression that any properly working oven heats in under 15 minutes. Usually under 10. I don’t see the point in letting an oven preheat for a whole hour while you prep ingredients. Plain wasteful. Baking stones vary that by a long shot, but those aren’t exactly common from my experience seeing into other people’s ovens.
I’d think at the end would be the best if we go for recipe standardization, as there are some baking recipes where you need to change the baking temperature partway through. That and baking is always the last thing you do in any baking recipe (aside from frosting, if applicable)
Anyway, the reason I’m wondering today is because the temperature is 100 degrees farenheit outside and I decided to bake a caserole. Silly me started preheating at step 1, as the recipe says. 45 minutes later, STILL chopping vegetables in what I thought would be a “quick” recipe, I’m sweating like a pig as my kitchen heats to an ungodly temperature with the oven still on. No A/C in the kitchen.
Maybe I shoulda just turned it off and then turned it on again when I was done. I don’t think too well when it’s this hot.
Also a baking stone isn’t going to make it heat up any faster. It will even out the rapid cycling (althought rapid is probably too strong a word). My kitchen is fairly big - and the rooms it is connected with are fairly big as well - so the heat usually isn’t much of a problem, but yes - I think shutting it off would have been useful
My oven and microwave have built in kitchen timers - which I sometimes will use for things like that. I certainly wouldn’t want to get overly hot. Prep time is often in the recipe - I don’t think your 10-15 minute guess is too far off - so you could set a timer based on prep time if you wanted.
Well when baking muffins for instance - some claim its important to put it in right away - so I like to make sure oven is heated. I’ll preheat for 30 minutes - cause I’m lazy and it doesn’t really matter to me if I waste a bit of electricity.
I think ovens used to take much longer to heat up and stabilize at the selected temperature than they do now. Sometimes its the recipe that’s still working under that premise, sometimes it’s the recipe author.
Preheating means the oven is at the correct temperature when whatever you’re baking goes in. This is probably much more crucial with something like cookies that only need to bake for 8-10 minutes in a hot oven. They don’t get scorched in an oven with burners going full blast while it preheats or not bake at all if the oven isn’t hot enough. For something that’s going to be in there for some time, probably doesn’t much matter when you start to preheat.
And yes, the banana bread recipe I have that starts out with preheat oven and ends with let batter rest for twenty minutes before baking is really annoying. I know better now and don’t fire up the oven as soon as I start.
I know my oven. Wherever the recipe indicates the oven temperature, beginning or end, I can figure out for myself when to turn it on.
HEAT oven to 450°F. Coat 8-inch ovenproof skillet or 8-inch square baking pan with no-stick cooking spray. Place skillet in oven to heat 7 to 8 minutes or until hot.*
Frankly, I’ll bet you’re wasting a whole lot less energy than you think. Ovens (even old ovens) are pretty well insulated – once it gets to temperature, holding it there for an hour isn’t going to use all that much energy, anyway, assuming you leave the door closed. If you’ve got a meter fine-grained enough (and an electric oven), turn the oven on from cold to 400, and go watch how many units it counts in a minute. Wait twenty minute and go to it again. My meter’s one of those sealed wireless thingies, so I can’t run the experiment.
I’ve left my (electric) oven on overnight before, and seen no change in my electric bill that month.
And for the record, I’ve owned lots of ovens, from antiquey things to modern ones, and none of them could preheat to 400 in ten minutes per an interior thermomenter, but I had one that thought it could (it actually got to about 320 and turned off the light, even though it would actually get to 400 given another few minutes.).
This could also be under the assumption that you’re making it in a cast iron skillet. If you’re not, it might not matter, if you are, it’s going to take extra time for it to heat up, all they’re trying to do is heat it first. But, if it works it works.
Martha White knows her cornbread. Of the three or four things I think make cornbread great, #1 is this, put the batter in a hot pan (cast iron, please).
I am not sure how she explains it, but I would NOT leave the pan in the oven the whole time it is heating up, but I definitely would stick it in there for 10 minutes or so before you pour the batter in it to get it nice and warm. I would also use butter, not oil. If you do this, you will get a delicious, buttery crust that is the best part of the cornbread. As to your other points:
If you use a cast iron pan, it will not cool off by the time you pour the batter in it.
Opening the door for a couple of seconds to get the pan is not going to take the heat of the oven down all that much, unless it isn’t properly preheated. You could, though, simply heat up the pan on the stove, if you don’t want to open the oven multiple times. This works as well.
This last point also brings us back to the OP. Now, a 45 minute preheat isn’t necessary, but there are several good reasons why the instructions are listed at the top of the recipe:
[ol]
[li]Consistency. You know where to look.[/li][li]Everyone’s oven preheats at a different rate. It would be impossible to pick a spot that would work for everyone.[/li][li]This one is maybe most important. Most folks should preheat longer than they think. When your oven beeps because it has hit 350, it is not yet properly preheated. It is true that the air in the oven has hit 350, but the surface areas of the oven are not yet fully heated and radiating the way they need to. This will lead to a couple of things. First, there will be more variation than normal as the surface areas heat up. If you listen to your oven, you will notice that it will turn on again very soon after the initial beep. It doesn’t hold that heat very long. After a while, the space between a re-light lengthens. [/li]
Related to this, if you open the oven (to put in your dish) before the surface areas are heated, you will lose a lot of the heat, and it will take a long time to get it back up to temperature. If you wait for the oven to get nice and ready, it will still lose some heat when you open it, but it will rebound quicker.
[/ol]
I always try to preheat my oven for 10 or 15 minutes past the initial beep that tells me it is ready. Of course, I have A/C so YMMV.
Some baked goods such as biscuits do not do well if you wait until they’re mixed before preheating the oven. You can put them in the fridge to stay cold, I guess.
I think the point is that it makes it heats up slower. My oven takes a little under ten minutes to heat up to 400 degrees without the stone in it; with the stone it takes a little more than fifteen. I can also turn the oven off about five minutes before the baking time is done when the stone is in, so it evens out.
I ignore such instructions. I just add 5 minutes to whatever time is specified to allow for the oven to heat up, but because oven temps aren’t reliable either, I never assume that the prescribed time is what it will take exactly. I check whatever is cooking by an appropriate method and remove it when it is done, never mind the clock.
I’ve had the experience of mixing all the ingredients and then realizing I should have preheated the oven, then having to stop and wait while it heats up. The preheating instruction right at the beginning serves as a useful reminder, at least for me.
Read the OP’s posts more closely. Macca26 says that, in following the recipe, preheating the oven was listed as the first step, and that was what was done, not realizing that there was nearly an hour of work in the recipe in between “preheat oven” and “place in oven”. The entire gist of Macca26 starting this thread is, “recipes should take this into account”.
