You prepared a recipe, and do not preheat the oven! Definitely not your desired result. Don’t blame the recipe, you did not follow the small important directions!
Preheating the oven plays a key role in cooking any type of food you want to cook in the oven. Join me to learn how to preheat the electric or gas oven properly.
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Common temperature for preheating an oven
If you pay attention to the recipes in most of them, you will be asked to preheat the oven to 350 to 370 degrees Fahrenheit (175-185 degrees Celsius). Do you know why?
The reason for choosing 350° is due to a chemical reaction between the sugar and the proteins in our food, which works well at this magical temperature. This temperature helps to create a good texture, pleasant smell with brown and roasted color in our food.
How do I prevent heat loss when I put food in?
Every time you open the oven door, the heat comes out quickly and can easily have a huge impact on the cooking of foods such as cakes and cookies that are sensitive to the baking temperature, especially at the beginning, and it wastes all your efforts.
Preheat above the main temperature
One of the easiest ways to prevent the oven temperature from dropping is to heat it to about 70 to 80 above (20 degrees Celsius) the original cooking temperature.
On one hand, this helps when the oven door is opened, the temperature does not fall much lower than the proper baking temperature, and on the other hand, it helps to cook foods such as cakes and cookies that need a higher initial temperature to get the right texture.
Use a pizza or baking stone
Our main goal in heating the oven should be to create a stable temperature for complete and uniform cooking.
Life has become more beautiful for me since I met baking stones! This simple tool can easily do the job of keeping the oven temperature even when you open the oven door.
Without this stone, because hot air can easily get out of the oven it will destroy your work, but the presence of this stone can provide the necessary heat inside the oven for a much longer time that is our goal.
How long to preheat the oven?
I think 10 to 15 minutes is enough for the oven to reach the right temperature, but keep in mind that different ovens require different times.
Older ovens, for example, take longer to heat up, and electric ovens take less time to heat up. Experience tells me that electric ovens reach the right temperature in half the time.
Sometimes the oven temperature needs to be very high, especially for cooking food like pizza. In this case, you have to add 5 to 10 extra minutes to your preheating time.
Why my oven doesn’t heat evenly?
Many people complain about their oven and ask me what can they do so that the oven can distribute the heat evenly?
My best answer for them is to use an oven baking stone in their oven and preheat well. The oven stone helps to evenly regulate the temperature by absorbing and distributing heat evenly throughout the oven.
Conclusion
An important factor in cooking is temperature control, which has a direct effect on changing the color, flavor, and nature of raw ingredients.
Here I have tried to share with you what I have experienced and I am happy to use your experience. So I am waiting for your comments. 🙂