This time of year, many of us spend more time indoors, baking and roasting. To prevent scorching your holiday cookies or side dishes, be sure to preheat your oven properly!
During the bake cycle, ovens utilize their bake element (or burner, if it’s a gas oven), which turns on and off periodically to maintain the oven’s internal temperature. However, during the preheat phase of the bake cycle, many ovens will cycle between the bake and broil elements/burners to reach the target temperature quickly. For this reason, it’s best to wait until after your oven has finished fully preheating before putting your food in.
While putting food in the oven prematurely may not make much of a difference for foods that take longer to cook (like roasting meat for several hours), if you put foods into the oven during preheating that normally bake for a shorter amount of time (like cookies, which usually only bake for 10 to 12 minutes), the higher temperature produced by the broil element can have a much bigger impact. This can result in foods coming out burned on the outside while still being undercooked or raw on the inside.
To properly preheat your oven and prevent any potential kitchen disasters, first set the bake temperature on your oven according to your user manual. Most residential ovens will take around 15 to 20 minutes to reach 350°F, but the higher the temperature, the longer it will take to preheat. Be patient, and make sure you don’t open the oven at all during this time—you’d be surprised at how much the temperature can drop by opening the door for just a moment! Once the oven indicates that it is fully preheated, open the door, put your food in, and close it as quickly as possible to avoid any excess heat loss. Use the oven’s window to check your food rather than opening the door to prevent any additional heat loss, and bake according to your recipe.
Even if you’ve never had the unfortunate experience of food being simultaneously burnt and undercooked, preheating your oven correctly means you’ll have more consistent baking results. Try it out the next time you bake!
Follow Renae on TikTok
