Ignore your oven dial

I'm curious what the pros on this forum think. ignore your oven dial.

I'm not a pro, but the thinking is correct. It's possible that very new, highly insulated ovens are able to maintain a fairly constant temperature, within a range of 5-10 degrees or so, but must ovens do not.

It's like the thermostat in your house - it heats to some temperature above your setting, shuts off, and then kicks back on when it drops below a certain point. The degree to which that swing takes place in your oven will depend on a lot of factors, including insulation in the oven, size of oven, age of oven, accuracy of internal thermometer, ambient temperature and humidity, etc.

Adding a pizza stone or two to the bottom rack of your oven will help maintain a more constant temperature as the stones absorb a significant amount of heat and therefore keep things more steady.

Also, instant read thermometers are a good idea both for checking oven temperature and desired food temperature.

[Robin Garr]

I'm not a pro in the sense of getting paid to work in a restaurant kitchen, although I have put in occasional time there, and more important, I do get paid to write about it.

I hadn't really thought of cooking in these terms before, but in a way I guess the guy is right. I don't get worked up about whether the oven is set to 347 or 368 degrees, and I do tend to monitor the dish and adjust the temp based on what I see, not on what a recipe says.

i knew that ovens were heated above the temp, allowed to fall below it, heated again, etc. It's jut obvious from watching the element in the oven. What I found more interesting was that different parts of the oven were at different temperatures, even to the point that oven thermometers were of dubious value.

I found this particularly interesting since we got a new (to us--off of Craigslist) range yesterday and it has the convection feature. It worked really well first time out. I would think that the circulated air would address the hot/cold spot issue.

[Robin Garr]

i knew that ovens were heated above the temp, allowed to fall below it, heated again, etc. It's jut obvious from watching the element in the oven. What I found more interesting was that different parts of the oven were at different temperatures, even to the point that oven thermometers were of dubious value.

An easy way to check this would be to bake a large sheet of cookies, and watch if there's a pattern of one corner or side turning brown before the rest, or lagging behind. It's for this reason that many baking recipes suggest rotating the pan 180 degrees halfway through cooking.

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I found this particularly interesting since we got a new (to us--off of Craigslist) range yesterday and it has the convection feature. It worked really well first time out. I would think that the circulated air would address the hot/cold spot issue.

We have a GE convection oven, and it does help. However, you might still try the cookie test and see what you see.