Friday, November 30, 2018

Your goose isn't cooked

So tonight I'm making dinner. I put a couple of things in the oven and wait awhile, figuring when the time comes I'll open it up and they'll be done. But before I do open the oven I look at the dial. I never turned it on. Then on a whim I google "forgot to start oven." Some subreddit has used it as an archetypical example of stupidity. Thanks, guys.

Dinner was fine, by the way. Just late.

2 comments:

susan said...

I know this isn't always done but I was taught to preheat the oven before putting the food inside. The main reason is that when cooking from a recipe, or following the instructions on pre-packaged food, there is a recommended time that the food needs to be cooked at the right temperature in order to be cooked properly and safe to eat. Meat, for instance (and particularly fowl), needs to reach a certain internal temperature in order to destroy dangerous bacteria.

There are lots of chemical reactions occurring when you cook food, and different reactions occur at different rates depending on the temperature. This means that while your food is in the oven below the right temperature, you will not get the right balance of reactions occurring while you cook and your food will look and taste better if you wait for the oven to heat up.

Ben said...

You blinded me with science!

Bacteria are certainly something you want to minimize in your food, and going the extra few feet to get that done is worthwhile.

Preheating is a good practice to that end. I'm fortunate in that my oven seems to heat up pretty quickly. So I don't have to start that early in order to get it to a preheated state.