The issue is from the element getting too hot while warming the oven up. Some ovens have features that warm the oven slower while still cooking some food correctly. Doesn’t work for baking obviously.
It winds up being a Little faster on my oven than preheat and cook. Adds about 8 minutes while preheating can be around 15-20.
when i was a kid, our ovens (🥑 green!) had a separate pre-heat setting and if you forgot to switch it to 'bake', it really messed up what you were trying to make.
Because in a recipe it’s impossible to specify cooking times without pre-heating. It’s easy to say 10 minutes at 200 degrees, because this would be exactly the same for everyone. Every oven is different, so the time would be different depending on your oven, which the person writing the recipe can’t know. So if the instructions on something like bread say pre-heat and bake for 10 minutes at 200 degrees, they know the result would be good.
There is also the fact ovens warm up differently. If there is a heating element within the compartment where the food is being heated (especially above), this element gets way too hot and emits a lot of infrared radiation whilst heating up the oven. It does this because it wants to get to the set temperature as fast as possible. Once it gets there it only needs to maintain that temperature, which is much easier, so the heating element gets much less hot during this time. If you set something like a cake in the oven with a heating element right above it, best case the top of the cake gets baked more than the rest, worst case the top gets burnt before the inside cooks.
Then there’s the fact whilst heating the temperatures inside the oven fluctuate a lot, some parts get hot fast, other parts take more time. When you have food that’s sensitive to that you def need to preheat.
And there’s a lot of chemistry going on, for example some foods get really greasy if they don’t get hot enough while cooking. Whilst these food could be cooked with the temperature going from 50 - 150 degrees, the end result would be much better if it’s just cooked at 200 during the whole process.
Now there are a lot of cases where this doesn’t matter and if you know your oven well enough you can compensate. But there are plenty of legit reasons to pre-heat and you may even have better results when pre-heating, even if the end result was fine before.
So I agree, people should pre-heat and there are tangible benefits!
Generally speaking, ovens will put out as much heat from the heating element as possible to reach the desired temperature quickly. Once at that temp, the oven maintains a largely even and consistent temperature so long as you aren’t opening it repeatedly. That allows you to have the same temperature surrounding your food at all times and have predictable cooking results and timing.
If you put food in at the start without preheating, your food is surrounded by room temp air instead of heated air, yet is exposed to high temp direct radiant heat from the heating element. It will eventually reach the even temp expected, but only after several minutes of that initial exposure to the direct heat of the element. That is far more likely to lead to over cooking the surface exposed to the heating element and/or undercook the remaining surfaces and interior. It is closer to trying to bake in a grill than in an oven.
If the thing you’re cooking is thin and is fine to heat from largely one side (like a pizza), your results may be acceptable if you keep an eye on it. If it is a cake or something though, it will be hot garbage, either burnt or soupy. Regardless, the cooking times on the instructions will not be remotely accurate.
Yeah that’s fair, but I feel it depends on what you’re cooking. Generally it’s a good idea to preheat the oven because you’ll get a more consistent cooking temperature. But for some things like shortbread, I often get a better result putting the dough into a cold oven as long as I’m consistent with the time. I’d never put something yeasted like bread into a cold oven tho that would be silly.
Probably little to none for most pizzas since they’re so thin, but with something like a deep dish you might end up with cooked cheese/toppings and doughy crust, or cooked crust and burnt cheese/toppings, or vice versa if the heating element is on the bottom.
Shure when im doing frozen food in the oven than probably because im doing something else, so throing it in is a 1min break, preheating is 5min so 500% longer.
Counterpoint, preheating just gives you a consistent starting point to follow their recipe. So you could follow their recipe once to see the intended result, then optimize it for your equipment (find the correct time and temp to get the intended result without preheating).
This all assumes you’re cooking a frozen thing. If you’re baking, follow the damned instructions. Baking is a science.
Yes, RTFM (Read The Fucking Manual) is kinda the gold standard if you’re looking for consistency and preheating is what eliminates most of the difference between shitty ovens and more reliable ones.
The time it takes to go from cold to hot varies massively between ovens, and your oven might not be up to temp by the time your recipe says to pull the stuff out.
Remaining factors are keeping consistent temperature and overshoot, which is why you’ll invest in a proper oven if you’re even remotely serious about baking.
You know what’s the real bullshit? Listing melted butter as an ingredient. Mother fucker, who keeps melted butter on hand? Make the ingredient oil, or make melting it part of the instructions!
I’m fine with melting butter, but show me where in the prices I’m supposed to do it.
The pancake recipe my wife likes me to make say something like:
Milk
Flour
Sugar
Egg
Melted, slightly cooled butter
add the lemon juice to the milk and let it thicken while preparing the dry ingredients.
Beat the egg into the milk then whisk in the melted butter.
If it was slightly cooled at the beginning it’s not whiskable by the time I get to the step. If it’s solid at the beginning it’s not slightly cooled when I go to whisk it in (it will be straight out of the microwave)
…
As someone else said, it’s an extremely small hill but I don’t think you’re going to push me off of it.
Lol. Not one I’ll try to push you off of. For reference il the recipe calls for 2 tablespoons of sugar compared to two cups of flour and two cups of milk.
I don’t even get how you’re supposed to do that without trial&erroring melting enough in the microwave. I know butter has the measurements written on the side (in Canada/USA at least) but it doesn’t help if you don’t have a fresh stick of butter
How’s that less convenient: You take the scales, take a bowl, hit tare, put stuff in, hit tare, rinse and repeat. Also just for the record milk and cream can be assumed to have the same density of water in the home kitchen, 1g/ml, oils get as low as 0.8g/ml which may or may not make a difference. Usually there’s plenty of tolerance.
Where things get awkward with common kitchen scales is spices and stuff in case you want repeatability with small batch sizes. OTOH milligram scales aren’t expensive, just don’t expect to use them to weigh out a whole bread they take like 100g or so max.
As much as I want to agree with @Stamets on the basis he’s a cool guy, this is an argument I can get behind.
Make the ingredient oil
As someone who can’t eat butter, 99% of the time you can make this move with a neutral-tasting cooking oil. Some folks are in love with how butter changes a dish’s flavor or richness, but there are many other ways to add fatty acids and glutamates to food. So it really is kind of bullshit - save time and reach for the vegetable oil.
The only exception are dishes that need the cooking fat to solidify in the fridge. Coconut oil and lard (suet too - but who has that?!) can work for those uses, but think ahead and beware of your melting points. You don’t want to deliver an oily mess of food to a friend’s house because it was warm out.
Remember though that butter is only 80% fat. Especially relevant for baking recipes where you have a ton of butter and if you replace that can make it denser and greasier. E.g. 200g butter you should replace with ~160g oil and 40ml water.
Dunno what that is, but legit answer: no, like sabbath. In Judaism, or at least certain branches, you’re not allowed to operate technology on Sunday. This can include not turning on your stove but (I’m assuming here) not putting food into it. I’ve heard of a similar cosmic loophole for laundry.
So the thing with judiasm is that God is perfect, God made the rules, and the rules have loopholes (such as this one with the oven) therefore the loopholes are intended and exploiting them just shows how much attention you pay to the rules and how religious and observant you are.
That means your literally half cooking your food, anything below the correct temp is generally doing nothing, so either you are messing up your final product unknowingly or realizing it's undercooked and having to leave it in the oven for longer to make up the difference.
It's not a time saver, it's just making bad food. What a weird self own.
either you are messing up your final product unknowingly or realizing it’s undercooked and having to leave it in the oven for longer to make up the difference.
For frozen pizza/nuggets/etc, the cooking time is always a range. I always just put it in while it preheats and set the timer for the top of the range. Everyone’s oven and preferences are different anyway so it’s not like some exact science. If they’re underdone, I leave them in another minute. Overall it saves time.
I used to not preheat my air fryer to make frozen pao de quiejo. It was ok, but then one day out of curiosity I did the preheat, holy shit it made a huge difference. Preheat resulted in a far better crust than using the full sized oven. True story
Sooooo uhhh, asking for a me, how does one preheat an air fryer? I feel like the one here cools off pretty much instantaneously once I open the door on it. Luckily the manual mentioned that I can just add three minutes to suggested times to skip preheating so I just do that 🤷♀️
Air fryers are convection ovens so they don’t need nearly as much heat-up time as, say, ten tons of stone worth of indirectly-fired wood oven, but it’s not like they spit out hot air instantly the resistive elements first have to get up to temperature.
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