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
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I always just never preheat but keep the food in for an extra 15% of the time it says on the recipe.
I microwave it for 2.5 times the oven time.
Name checks out.
And overcook at the same time.
Go for it! Fortunately I don’t have to eat your god forsaken food
What? Is this a thing? This is kinda stupid?
Only exception I found is bacon. Get one of those big metal baking sheets with 1-2" sides, and line it with baking paper. Lay your strips of bacon down, without them touching, and put in the oven. Set to around 425 and your bacon should be done in about 10-15 minutes once the preheat beep goes off. You figure out the time that works with your oven and bacon thickness. Memory is a little fuzzy.
I read that somewhere once and it comes out way better. Otherwise the top side never gets browned and then you try flipping them to make up for it and it sucks. This way you don’t have to mess with it and the paper absorbs most of the grease. Easy to clean up.
Yep cooking bacon slowly is the holy grail of perfectly cooked bacon
It was just amazing as I had been preheating like all the instructions said on various sites, but it never came out amazing. Found one random comment that said to NOT preheat and stick it in cold was the magic I needed. I never liked cooking bacon on the stovetop. Throwing it in the oven is easier for me and I can do bigger batches, especially with two baking pans.
You’re literally always going to be wrong
I feel the same way, but only for pre-cooked frozen foods. Not for baking, and nice dishes
Preheat your pizza or else
Bro it’s super easy and makes cooking way more consistent… You’re not cool for not preheating lol
The oven is quite cool on the other hand
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.
Not even the Stormtroopers in episode IV did that
Yer foods gonna be shite
Not necessarily tbh
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.
Well…you should? It takes no efforts and has tangible benefits on how your meal cooks
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!
As a preheated oven, I can confirm this
microwave with an oven setting supremacy no need to preheat cause it’s small enough 😎
I think I got that to work correctly once 😮💨 like baking a pizza went poorly but baking a chicken works I think
This logic will never make sense to me.
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.
I don’t see any attempts to logic, it’s just fewer steps:
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turn on oven
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put frozen pizza in
versus
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turn on oven
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wait
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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.
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!
People be lazy and just want to eat “something”, even if it sucks
not a fan of the square-ish party pizzas they have now, but they do fold-over a lot easier.
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.
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.
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