Every oven I have dealt with in my memory has a lowest temperature setting of 170 F. But temperatures like 110 or 120 would be perfect for rising bread or making yogurt. If there is an stove with a low temperature, you will not find it by reading specs. Why is this? Surely if you can design controls with temperatures in the range 170-500, why can’t it be 100-500?
I think what you want is sold as a warming drawer.
I use the microwave over the range for raising dough. If I switch on the range light underneath, it warms up the chamber quite nicely.
Otherwise, you could try preheating the oven to its lowest temperature while you’re kneading and autolyzing then switch it off and do the raising in there.
My oven has one of those. For me, personally, it’s useless and I just use it as storage for pots and pans (or other things not harmed by the heat).
I found out it was a warming drawer and not an actual oven when I tried to cook something in it and it just wasn’t working.
I’m also guessing part of the reason they’re not common is because, like me, so few people have a enough use for them. Not very many people make their own yogurt (and can’t you do that in a crock pot?) and some people make their own bread, but I’m guessing a lot of them have a bread maker or just leave the dough somewhere warm for a while.
It’s also possible that the t-stat isn’t very accurate at such a low temp and/or an element made to be used most often in the 350-400 range, might have to be constantly cycling on and off to maintain a temp of, what, 30-50 degrees over the ambient air temp (meaning you could set it for 110 and it’ll spend the entire time swinging between 90 and 140, for example).
Their main purpose seems to be to keep cooked food warm before serving, and perhaps to warm plates before use.
In the UK we call them proving drawers, which perhaps explains their intended purpose (bread-making), but they are equally good for plate warming. I wish I had one.
I just turn on the light in the oven to warm it up for proofing bread then put the bowl near the oven for the final rise when it’s time to heat the oven to baking temperature. It’s not perfect but it works. I’m not willing to pay the price for a dedicated warming drawer.
I’ve tried a bread machine but I prefer longer multi-day rises and ended up just using the bread machine as a yogurt maker; it’s great for that.
I have a warming oven, a drawer really, we use it to keep things warm and for proofing pizza dough for example. When I’m making sourdough bread during cold months I need to activate yeast that’s been in my fridge. As already mentioned, I typically just put it in my main over and leave the light on overnight.
I wouldn’t say I use the warming oven a lot, and I’ve never had one before or felt I needed one (this one came with the house), but it comes in handy when you need to keep something warm and don’t want to use your main oven for that purpose.
One challenge with low temps is that the heating elements in ovens are either on or off. When they come on, they come on full blast. They are throwing off tons of radiant heat, which may brown whatever you are trying to warm. It would be like trying to warm up a roll with a blowtorch that is either full blast or off. There’s too much heat intensity. What you want is a lower level of heat which allows things to warm slowly.
Some ovens will have a special warming drawer which has a different heating element. This element will be able to provide variable heat levels. So rather than full blast or off, it can be anywhere in between. It would work more like the burners on the stovetop which allow you to set the level of heat anywhere from low to high.
Yes, I noticed that the other day when I was done cooking my Kentucky Bourbon Salmon and just wanted to keep it warm. I keyed the temperature down, thinking 120 degrees would be great, and it just stopped descending at 170 degrees. To me, food is still cooking at a temperature that high, and I didn’t want it to cook anymore. I just turned the oven off and left it sitting in there.
Learning about warming drawers, etc, is really neat, but I don’t understand WHY it stops at 170, and why that particular temperature as opposed to any other.
Usually I just turn the oven light on and leave it on, but this morning it was burnt out. I started the oven warming at 170 and turned it off when it hit 130. But that’s when I began to wonder why it couldn’t have a low setting. It worked fine, incidentally.
^ That’s what I do when I’m rising bread (I almost said “baking bread” but for the actual baking the temperature is higher, of course).
Our oven has a Bread Proofing setting n it, no warming drawer (it’s a downdraft Jenn-Air, no room below the oven).
Our oven has a plate warming drawer. I use it for any meal I spend time on, maybe 20% of the dinners I serve.
For dough proofing I boil a pot of water and put it in the oven along with my dough. No peeking.
Back in the 50s or thereabouts, many stoves were roughly about twice as wide as today and had two ovens. In most such cases, I believe, one of them was a warming oven, and only one was for baking/roasting. I seem to remember my parents having such a stove. It looked similar to this:
I presume they went out of fashion both to save space and because warming ovens were not that much in demand.
I have two ovens in my kitchen here in Europe. Both have a lowest setting of 50C (about 120F). I’ve used them at this temp, without any apparent issues.
This is no problem with modern (I mean, like anything newer than 1960’s) technology. Even the broiler element could be controlled such that the temperature never varied more than a few degrees from it’s set point, using a phase-angle controller.
Prove it.
mmm
I had this in Brussels and it was fantastic. Not cheap, I admit, but the possibilities were a joy. Including raising bread, pyrolytic cleaning, a door that disappered when opening it so it was never in the way, steam addition, timer for everything (start and stop) and a sabbath function I never used but was just amazing. I guess without having ever tried that it would switch from °C to F to keep the USA happy. And 60 x 60 cm are 23.62 x 23.62 inches. Perhaps too small for your biggest turkeys, but I still miss it sometimes.
I have a toaster oven with a ‘keep warm’ setting that goes from 120-190F. Very convenient when you need to keep something warm while you are working on the rest of the meal.