My oven runs hot so I adjust by 25°. If I need 450°, I set the oven temperature to 425°, then wait for it to preheat. When the light goes off to say it is ready, I zero out the oven temp alarm if the alarm also tells me the temp has been reached. Now I have a high and low temperature range when set at 425°.
Today, the lowest temp was 378° and the highest temp was 509°. Over 100 ° difference. The highs and lows change every time I use it. Sometimes the high goes over 525°.
If I have my oven set at 425°F when a recipe calls for 450°F, when is the best time to put the bread in the oven?
Should I put the bread in when the temperature is at its highest? When I open the oven, the temperature drops to about 290° if I don't waste any time.
Or would it be better to put the bread in at the lowest temperature?
Does it matter which bread I am baking? Container?
I have been putting the bread in at the highest temperature. Thank you.
Patti, a drop from 450 to 290 (by opening the door) sounds high, but I haven’t recorded my temps to know if this is a norm.
If you have a stone it might work as a heat sink to maintain some heat.
I would load the bread at high temp in anticipation of a temp drop.
Dan
Patti, if you are talking about a regular home oven, something sounds wrong, that is an awfully wide temperature swing. One thing to do, when the oven is cold , is to try to locate the sensor in the oven - it will is usually several inches long and very thin, about the thickness of a darning needle, and is usually attached to one of the walls, with a cable or tube that goes through the oven wall. You might try to clean it if it is dirty, that could cause some problems, like if something got spilled on it and cooked onto it. Be very careful, you don't want to damage the cable that goes to the controls. Otherwise, it may be the control itself that is off. If you have a toaster oven, it is not hard to believe you get such wide swings.
Thanks, Dan and Barry,
I keep a rectangular, Cordierite pizza stone in the oven that can take high heat and can be used on a grill. It takes up almost one entire rack with about 4" inches open on the front and back and 1" open on each side.
No, it is not a toaster oven, but sometimes I think it acts like one. it is a very expensive, double hybrid wall oven that has never worked like I think it should. I use a Chef Alarm and an oven probe to keep track of the temps.
I have noticed the sensors, but never thought about cleaning them. I will do that today.
I don't know whether it is better to bake at too high temps or too low temps since my oven has such a wide range, so I try to adjust the temp as it goes too high. It is a pain to stand there and watch it.
Thanks again. I will continue putting the loaf in at the highest temp.
Patti, there is definitely something wrong with a full size oven having that large a swing. I have never heard of a double hydrid wall oven, but when I did a google search, it lead to an American Range product with a gas oven and an electric oven. Hopefully one of them would have a might tighter range. Plus or minus 25 would be better than what you have.
Yes, that's the one. All the problems started while under warranty, but they couldn't find a repairman who could fix it. They no longer respond to me by email and won't return phone calls. The oven has been nothing but trouble. I think it is a design flaw, but they say it is designed that way. The electric oven's broiler comes on when I preheat the oven, but it continues coming on during the bake cycle. A.R. has since redesigned the oven, but won't help me with mine. No parts are available to fix it. Nice, huh!
Last week, I finally got the gas oven fixed $450.00. The flame would blow itself out then relight, but it wouldn't heat higher than 275° since it never stayed lit. Repairman couldn't find the sensor to shut off the electric broiler during baking so it didn't get fixed.
So, I make do with what I have. Difficult to bake bread with.
Patti, sorry to hear that - one of the unfortunate things with appliances, sometimes you get a lemon and the manufacturer turns a blind eye. One last thought is to try cooking with a cast iron cooker - like a dutch oven or a combo. If you preheat long enough, it should even out the temp swings a little. I would definitely put it in when it is the hottest. Some bakers who use home based wood fired ovens would get them hot enough to bake pizza, then as it cools down, they would throw in bread to bake, so the temp of the oven would always be falling as they baked bread. So long as you get it hot enough to start, the drop off won't be insurmountable, though you will have to keep a close eye since the bake time will vary greatly.
That makes sense...Get the highest temp for oven spring. Thanks.
My stove although not very old had to have the motherboard that controls the oven replaced. Almost sounds like a computer issue since it is so changeable. I’m not any sort of engineer so........
It is sort of a basic oven. Professional type. No bells at all. No self cleaning, No electronics. No timer. Just 4 lights, convection, bake, broil. Even the temp knobs are basic...Knob shows every 25 degrees. 350...375...400, etc. The bad thing is I wanted one without electronics so nothing would go wrong!!! Electronics always go out. HA!! Joke's on me! They have gone up in price since I bought mine 6 years ago. $5000.00 higher.
I am fortunate to be able to run thermal data logs. I checked some of my old charts to see what my ovens does when the door is opened after preheat. See chart below.
It is somewhat ironic. You show a drop of 160 and my chart shows 159F. I ran 3 probes for this test. 1 was the ambient temp within the oven. Another the temp inside a covered Graniteware cooker. The last was placed inside a cast iron covered cooker.
How did you measure the temperature variance?
I hope we find that your oven is not the problem. Tremendous amounts of heat is lost when home ovens are opened. This is why we use stones, steels, and/or covered vessels to bake bread.
HTH
Dan
It sounds similar to what I experienced but with a much cheaper home oven-Kenmore. HERE is the link for my reply in a post and below is specifically my reply. BTW, my PID controller works beautifully and cost was minimal. Good luck!
I have an oven that burns things on the bottom all the time yet is still within specs for temp. It took a while to diagnose and couldn't have done it without my talented SO but we finally figured it out.
All ovens have a range that they operate in and a 35 degree swing is considered quite normal. So if you set it at 400F, it could range 35degrees around 400-ideally 400 being in the middle-so from 380F-415F. Since most situations aren't ideal, it could be 370-405 or even 399-435. However, the range was not the only problem with my stove. The reason my bread would burn on the bottom was that when the oven temp dropped to the point that it turned the element on to raise the temp, it came on screaming hot and raised the temp very quickly. It did this every time it cycled. It was equivalent to briefly blowtorching the bottom of the pan each time it came on.Things were better if I raised the shelf higher in the oven away from that element. So now I have a 1 shelf oven that doesn't burn bottoms but still seems to dry things out. We are installing a PID controller (bypassing the controls) that should help.
Another issue we discovered was that most oven thermometers (we tried 4) are horribly inaccurate compared to a lab-grade thermosensor. It was a tedious process monitoring an oven for temperature over a few hours. It will be interesting to see if the new controller makes a difference.
Dan, I use a Thermoworks Chef Alarm with an oven air probe. The highs and lows vary every time I use it. I am baking bread today and will test again. Interesting chart, thanks.
Clazar, what is a PID? How and where does it get installed? My oven weighs over 650 pounds so I can't remove the oven to install anything in the back.
Thanks again.
Patti, a PID controller uses a computer to sense temperature, and turn on and off a heating element to maintain an accurate setting. I thought about suggesting one for you, but it would be quite a project. On a normal thermostat, if you set it for 400, it will come on and heat the oven up to 400, when it will turn off the electric element. The element will still have residual heat, and so the heat will continue to rise in the oven. Once the oven cools back down to whatever the cut in temp, the thermostat will click on, and the element will come back on and the cycle will repeat.
With a PID, once it is set up, it is tuned to your oven. If the oven temp is set at 400, the PID will switch the element on, at 375 it will switch it off for a second , then on for a second, and so on so that it gradually coasts up to 400 degrees. As it starts to fall below 400 degrees, it will switch the element on for a second then off for a second so that it maintains 400. The difference between a regular thermostat and a PID is like driving a car by either stomping the pedal to the floor, or taking your foot off the floor, as opposed to being able to adjust the pressure on the pedal to maintain a constant speed whether going uphill or downhill.
It is not uncommon to see do it yourself PID controllers installed on lower watt heating equipment - such as smokers- here is a very basic one https://www.bbq-brethren.com/forum/showthread.php?t=117534. For a smoker, it is pretty easy to build one since there is only one element, and normally you just bypass all the controls on the smoker and use the PID to turn it on and off and set the temp.
To run a heavier load like your appliance, you would need a relay that was sized to handle the load. It would also be a fairly drastic change, since you would need to install the sensor in the oven, and do a fair amount of work rewiring the oven so that the controller was always on. You would need to find a repair person who was really up to the challenge, and even then, the controller would only be for the bake element, so you would likely have to abandon the broil element.
It would be far cheaper to see if you can find a used countertop electric oven. If you can live with the quarter sized one, Cadco's can be found fairly cheaply near me. The shipping price seems far too low on this one, https://www.ebay.com/itm/Cadco-Unox-XAF003-Roberta-Convection-Oven-Used/202582188938?hash=item2f2ad6e38a:g:004AAOSwTEZcUoCf:sc:USPSPriorityFlat…
Here is another https://www.ebay.com/itm/Cadco-Roberta-Convection-Oven-Unox-XAF003/254096295679?hash=item3b2951c6ff:g:DY0AAOSwDmxcS~CC:rk:2:pf:1&LH_ItemConditi…; I have one and the temperature control is excellent.
It might be better. I have no counter space. I would love one though. Maybe I can find a space in a bedroom. Thanks.
I put mine in my garage, got that tip from a poster here.
Baking in a garage! Who knew! I will start searching for an oven.
Last night, I used convection set at 375°F instead of the regular bake cycle to bake bread. The loaf turned out a little hard. Not soft at all. I used a light colored metal pan that usually turns out soft sides and bottoms.
The high and low temps were much closer together. So I wonder if the convection air currents fooled the temp probe on my Chef Alarm. The average temp was about 366°F with convection. I needed 400° with regular bake cycle so I set the convection to 375°. Either the oven runs cooler on convection or the probe was tricked.
What does convection do to bread? Thanks.
Hey Patti, I was just thinking...
I’ll be you can calibrate your oven’s temp. I have a home oven and it can be calculated.
But, I’ll bet if others closely monitored their home ovens, there would be many temp variances on most (if not all) ovens. Since I started thermal charting I have noticed big temp cahnges when opening doors etc. A stone or steel, working as a heat sink, might be our best option.
Danny
Patti, convection can be a good thing, and a bad thing, for bread. In the first few minutes, convection is bad , since it will tend to dry out the outer skin of the loaf, when we are trying to keep it moist so it will get max oven spring. Once the loaf size has fully expanded, convection will dry out the skin, but that can be a good thing, if you want a cracking crust , or even to get the nice deep browns that taste great, though to the uninitiated may look burnt. The Cadco is convection only, so I use a combo cooker for the first half of the bake to keep in moisture, then take off the top to brown the loaf. You can do the same with a dutch oven. The other option is that there is a small vent tube at the back of the oven. If you set it up so you can get to that, you can find or make a suitable stopper, then add steam to the oven when you load the loaf ( such as Sylvia's Steaming towel method) then remove the stopper once you want to vent the steam.
Convection will not fool your temperature probe, but it can make the temp in the oven more even from one spot to another. So it may be that without convection, you were measuring in a spot that was normally hotter than some other part of the oven, and the convection fan just evened that out. The final possibility is that some manufacturers program convection temperatures differently than non convection. When convection ovens first came out, the standard instruction was to reduce the recipe temperature by 25 degrees farenheit and decrease time by 15 to 20%. Later, some manufacturers started programming the oven so that when it was set to convection, the oven itself decreased the temp by 25 degrees from what was selected.
From your first post you said you had a 100 degree swing during a cooking session, and that the upper and lower temps would vary each time you used it. That strongly suggests either the sensor has gone bad, or the computer board that tells the element when to come on and off is having issues. I am not aware of any ovens that demonstrate that big a swing ( other than toaster ovens ) with the door closed. If I misread it, and your swing, with the oven door closed, is in the neighbor of 50 or 60 degrees, than that may well be to specifications.
The higher the temp, the larger the temp differences. This is with the door closed. Plus I zero out the Alarm once temp is back up (after opening door). The gas oven works better than the electric oven for baking. For all other baking, the gas oven is fine. It is just baking bread loaves that is giving me problems. That tells me it must be something I am doing wrong or the problem is my recipes.
I tried a Dutch oven, but it baked too hot and burned the bread. I tried a bread cloche with and without preheating and with and without lid. I tried using my pizza stone with a cup of ice added to a pan on a lower rack.
As to fooling the probe....your explanation makes sense.
This is just a learning process that is going to take time. I have never had an oven that gave me problems until this one. This oven has been this way since the beginning.
Thanks.
I use a stone. Most of the bread baking problems arise when baking at 400°F or higher.
I can't get American Range to respond to me so I don't know if it can be calibrated or not. Thanks, Dan
Patti, like Clazar stated there are lots of indormation on the web if you google it. I see where others report your same problem.
What is the model of your American Range?
I googled "calibrating an American Range oven and got a number of hits. I hope this is helpful.
I have a 7 yr old consumer grade Kenmore electric oven from Sears (in USA). When I had problems with this oven it would have a 50 -75 degrees swing. I was told that a 40-50 degree swing was considered "acceptable" these days. We were able to adjust the range so it was closer to the 40-50 degree range, as I recall, but that didn't solve my problem because when it dropped to the low point and turned on the element to bring it up to temp, that element came fully on and screaming hot for a short period of time. As a result, the bottoms of whatever was baked in the oven had almost burnt bottoms and pale tops. It was like using a blow torch every few minutes to add a few degrees of heat. My point being that even if you calibrate the range, the oven may be designed to heat very quickly resulting in blow-torched bottoms (or tops depending on where the element is located.).
I, also, have a garage stove. It is a very cheap 22" apartment-sized gas stove that is about 20 yrs old and converted to run on propane. It cooks everything evenly and at a good temp-everything bakes perfectly in that oven. Go figure.
Good luck.
Yes, that is exactly it!
On my electric oven, the broiler comes on screaming hot. I think this is a design flaw. The electric broiler should shut off quicker. If I try to bake a cake on the lowest rack in the electric oven, the bottom doesn't burn, but the top does even though I am using the lowest rack. The bottom should burn because the rack is too low! The cake bakes in about half the time, and I check for doneness with a toothpick. I can't do that with bread.
On the gas oven, I can watch the chef alarm's high and low temperatures and hear the gas oven igniting when it shouldn't. Sometimes, it ignites before the temp on the alarm has gone lower than the oven knob's set temp. (If I set the knob to 450, it ignites before the alarm goes lower than 450°.) Other times, it ignites late so the alarm shows a lower temp before it reignites. And that thermostat part was just replaced.
I had planned on buying a foldable dough proofer, but I may buy a countertop oven instead. I read that some can also be used to proof bread or keep starter at set temps like the folding proofer.
Thanks everyone.