The whole thing can be solved by reading the entire recipe before doing anything. With a bit of experience, you’ll know how long prep takes and how long it takes to preheat. Worst comes to worst, pause near the end of prep to preheat, then do the rest of the work slowly.
IIRC, the chemistry based book of food and cooking said that there are significant temperature gradient issues in preparation of some food, and putting some foods in a cold oven is going to hurt the quality. One example is crisping the skin of a turkey or chicken by starting it in a very hot oven, and then turning the oven down. Not preheating the oven in this case is not going to work at all.
I try to put the preheat instruction into the recipes I write at what I feel is the appropriate point, but…
I always tend to err on the side of earlier, as you never know how fast other people will work, or how fast their oven heats up.
Not having it in a constant place in my recipe template means there’s a risk I will forget to include the instruction altogether.
A lot of things can be solved that way. I’m just sorry it took thirty years of cooking before I finally figured that out.
I live in a rental with the cheapest oven my landlord could find. It takes fifteen to twenty minutes to heat to 375. For basic cookies I make a game of turning on the oven and trying to have the dough made and two trays ready to go in when I hear the “ding” that signifies it’s reached temperature.
I support the notion of consistency and always having the temperature first. I can adjust. Preheating too early probably causes fewer problems than preheating too late. Also if I’m planning a special meal I can glance quickly and see if temperatures and cooking times are compatible.
Now if only my husband would learn that preheating is not just a helpful suggestion. We had lots of instances of “why didn’t this turn out?” or “why isn’t this done? It’s been in twenty minutes longer than the recipe says.” The answer was always because he hadn’t preheated.
Most recipes I’ve seen don’t have the preheated oven as the first step. They either have it above the steps, or just include it when telling you to put it in the oven. (e.g. Step 4: Place in an oven that has been preheated to 350).
This was my reaction too. Once hot keeping it hot uses pretty little energy. My oven doesn’t turn back on once hot for a good long time if the door is closed. An extra 10 to 20 minutes of maintaining the temperature is pretty close to nothing. OTOH not having the oven hot to put things into when you need it to be can effect how the recipe turns out. (And let’s face it, some of us get into a groove when chopping and mixing and measuring and might in that groove forget to turn on the oven as step 3. Get that small bit out of the way so its ready and you don’t need to possibly wait at the end.)
That’s pretty much it for me. If I’m up to my elbows in flour and butter, turning on the oven is an easy step to miss. If it’s the first thing that I do a) I’m not going to forget and b) I’m going to have clean hands
I like all the people that think someone’s advocating for not preheating? Nobody in the thread said anything about NOT preheating.
I know preheating is important, and I always preheat unless the recipe says otherwise. I was just slightly annoyed about the fact that sometimes I forget how long I take to do something, or I misjudge how long I’ll take to prep something, and the oven sits there for an hour, on, with nothing in it if I do preheating as step 1. I always read recipes first, but this happens anyway.
I’ve never been able to properly judge my time at doing mundane kitchen tasts. It’s a common error even if you do the same thing a lot - you can see this happen in work environments, especially coding, where people tend to believe it’ll take them half the time it actually does to do something. Some people never get better at the estimating.
I like recipes that have the preheat step somewhere in the middle. I like to preheat for only 15 minutes because of my (apparently mistaken) belief of energy wastefulness and the fact that I will be dying of heatstroke in my kitchen past that point.
Right, but if YOU don’t know how long it takes you to chop an onion, how on earth is a recipe writer going to know? It’s not like it’s the same for everyone.
Exactly. And a lot of times, I try to get everything chopped and at the ready (a quasi mise en place) to makes things go more quickly. Depends on what I’m doing, but I try to get the prep work done before cooking. And sometimes I do it as I go along.
And some dishes don’t even require that preheat, so I ignore them. A casserole for instance, is not going to suffer being put into a cold oven. Any slow-cooked dishes are fine thrown into a cold oven (unless you are doing some sort of early “sear” step at 450 before throwing the heat down to 325.)
Anyhow, the most sensible place to put the preheat step, IMHO, is the beginning of the recipe as a reminder and because the recipe writer has no clue how quick or slow you are with prep. And experienced cooks will just gloss over it, anyway, and judge for themselves when to preheat or even skip it, like I do, when appropriate.
As for the OP, it depends. If a recipe is fairly complicated - say, lots of chopping, I’ll prep everything, measure it all out, then turn on the oven before I begin mixing (if the oven’s not ready when it’s time to combine wet/dry ingredients for some things, then I’ll wait until it is preheated for that final step).
If it’s an easy recipe, I start it preheating, make the item, and by the time it’s ready for the oven, the oven should be ready.