Well…you should? It takes no efforts and has tangible benefits on how your meal cooks
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!
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.
Yer foods gonna be shite
Not necessarily tbh
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!
This is such a tiny hill to stand on, and I love it.
“Melt butter!? How the hell do I do that!?”
“What am I, a chemist?”
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.
Sugar in pancakes? That’s my hill now
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.
It’s probably got to do with Americans measuring everything by volume, they have to melt it to measure it.
Our butter stick wrappers have volume measurements on them. I’ve never melted butter to measure it.
So then why don’t you measure butter in centimetres? Oh, inches, I’m sorry.
Our butter is usually marked out in tablespoons. It’s also just known that a stick of butter is half a cup.
Every person measuring butter in cups (melted or not) is deranged and not worth listening to.
To be fair that kind of goes for measuring anything in cups. Measuring by weight is way more precise (although less convenient).
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.
Measuring spoon go brrr… Is what I would say if I grew up in imperial hell.
Don’t underestimate the degree of stupidity that leads to measuring both liquids and solids by volume still being a thing.
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
Truth
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.
Go for it! Fortunately I don’t have to eat your god forsaken food
I never turn my over off, so I don’t run into that problem.
Damn every oven I’ve used turns itself off after 12 hours. Fucks up my BBQ when I forget to turn it back on.
look up if your model of oven has a Shabbat mode that’ll disable auto-shutoff
like I’m sha- shabba ranks?
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.
lol do people really do that? leave their oven on all day and pretend they’re observing the sabbath? what am i saying of course people do that…
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.
It is one of my favorite fun facts.
Oh yeah! The difference between judeo praxis and christian intent
God can’t see it if you set it the day before. But I’m just making a guess based on the name.
TIL of Shabba Ranks the musician
You must know Josh.
I never imagined 196 being such a nasty place until I started looking through this thread. How many posts need to be made, each with dozens or hundreds of upvotes, all just saying “Then your food’s shit [you moron]!”
Like, damn, I’m pretty sure Stamets isn’t gonna beam into these people’s houses and force-feed them food cooked in a non-preheated oven. Maybe, I guess, but just stun him with a phaser if he tries it? This really seems like a non-issue of one person’s preference that doesn’t need a whole community piling onto it.
I will literally kill you if you don’t like the correct type of roman pillar decorations
Now we get into the dangerous game of guessing Doric, Ionic or Corinthian. And if you like your life extra YOLO you’ll either say Composite or Tuscan.
We’ll call this game Roman Roulette. I’m going with Corinthian.
Death
196 doesn’t always think about the Roman empire. It thinks about pillars. Doomed to
What’s funny is you’re the only one who said “you moron”
I’m angry about the way this person cooked their own food that I don’t have to see or eat!
You’re literally always going to be wrong
This logic will never make sense to me.
I don’t see any attempts to logic, it’s just fewer steps:
-
turn on oven
-
put frozen pizza in
versus
-
turn on oven
-
wait
-
put frozen pizza in
You end up with a worse pizza without waiting.
Unless you’re high and eating a Totinos party pizza like a taco, then all bets are off.
I notice zero difference between preheated pizza and non-preheated pizza. What would the difference even be?
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.
Was that a dig at Totinos party pizzas? If so, we can’t be friends anymore.
And there’s no other way to eat those than folded over like a taco!
No, it’s really the only exception.
not a fan of the square-ish party pizzas they have now, but they do fold-over a lot easier.
You consider waiting a step?
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.
I do most of my meal making on the stovetop, but I never bake without preheating.
-
I actually cook a lot and I do this. The benefits aren’t very significant but it certainly doesn’t ruin meals (if you cook like me lol).
It’s more energy efficient and doesn’t affect the food as much as you would think. Because of the temperature difference between your oven and house, and that heat rises, tons of heat flies out of the oven as soon as you open it. That is why there’s the massive blast of heat from the oven when you open it, it’s practically flying out at mach speed.
Afterwards there are only minor benefits from preheating the oven because the temperature has dropped significantly and it has preheated itself (and food) again anyways.
Secondly I never strictly use timers to tell me whether my food is cooked or not. Even “30 mins at 300 degrees” on different ovens will give you varied results, because built in oven thermometers are not very accurate. Additionally to make the oven look more accurate the screen will lie to you. On my oven, quickly after reaching temp, it may say “400”. If I turn my oven off and on, and immediately set it to 400 again it’ll say something like “325”, because it’s a lying sack of shit that tries to trick me into thinking it’s faster and more accurate than it really is.
That’s why independent oven thermometers are so popular. This is also why I gauge my food by it being cooked or not. I look at the crispyness and browning of the food. If it’s a good color, I remove it. If undercooked, no shame in returning it to the oven. If the outside is burnt and the inside undercooked then that’s the fault of either the recipe, cooking vessel or temperature (which is part of the recipe anyways).
Thirdly it makes managing things marginally easier. Instead of trying to optimally time your preheat as to not waste time, but also not to waste energy for 20 minutes, it’s easier just to turn it on with the food in.
I hope you understand why I don’t believe in the satanic oven preheating conspiracy.
Sometimes things come out better that way, so do as you wish. Just know that many things will come out leagues better if you do that extra bit of prep.
I don’t care what you say. I stir-fry in a cold pan like a boss. I like my vegetables flopsy and oily thank you very much
Imagine actively deciding to make shittier food, couldn’t be me
It’s telling how many people equate preheating oven to cooking frozen pizza.
I just cook it like 2-5 min longer than it says and its always tasty and fine. I never preheat. Its fine.
It really depends on what you’re doing. Consider a steak: If you put it into a cold pan and heat it up it’s going to be 110% done on the inside before you get to temperatures that cause browning – the protein is going to denature at ~70C, Maillard reactions occur at about 140-160C. So rule of thumb is if you want crisp or brown anything, you probably should blast it with some actual heat.
Then, when it comes to printed recipes: While every oven bakes differently they heat up even more differently, so if you want to give a baking time including the pre-heat is going to increase the error bar quite a lot.
And then there’s stuff that needs proper rituals to turn out good, bread is probably the best example: Preheat, steam, falling temperature. Sure you’ll get something edible if you put some dough in a cold oven but it’s not going to be nearly as good, raise strangely, have structural issues, and forget about having a proper crust.
Oh, coming back to pans: “Hot pan, cold oil”, as the Chinese say, is how you make iron pans non-stick: Without preheat not only is your steak going to be soggy, it’s also going to be glued to the pan. If you use a teflon pan at the temperatures needed for a proper sear you’ll quickly need to buy a new one while even bargain-bin iron pans are going to last generations.
“Stop instructing me to wash my ass, I’m literally never going to wash my ass.”
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