I’m no chef, but I love to cook, and my thanksgiving meals are planned in spreadsheets with 10 minute increments of what goes where. Plus I currently live full-time in an RV so I’ve gotten used to improvising with nonstandard and less reliable tools. Take or leave my suggestions accordingly.
It’s often a good idea, until and unless you know your oven really well, to put an oven thermometer in the oven on the rack and adjust accordingly. They’re <$10. Try placing it in different spots and figure out how evenly or unevenly your oven heats, and how a pan in one spot affects temperature in another.
Composition and thickness of your pan also matters. Ovens heat from all sides, but it matters whether your food is sitting in glass, steel, thin aluminum, or thick aluminum. Cake mixes try to give different instructions for glass, metal, and dark metal, but it’s going to vary by recipe.
And it matters whether you’re using a convection or conventional oven. The standard advice is shorter times and lower temperatures for convection, but you might still get differences in terms of drying out the top before the bottom and center cook fully with convection. Maybe you have to cover it part of the time, for some recipes.
If you misjudge and want more crispiness, why not briefly broil at the end? Say you’re trying to braise a roast in a pan next to, above, or below the dish of potatoes. Steam from the roast slows the cooking and prevents browning. Then when you take the roast out to rest, you have a couple of minutes to broil before serving.
I’m no chef, but I love to cook, and my thanksgiving meals are planned in spreadsheets with 10 minute increments of what goes where. Plus I currently live full-time in an RV so I’ve gotten used to improvising with nonstandard and less reliable tools. Take or leave my suggestions accordingly.
It’s often a good idea, until and unless you know your oven really well, to put an oven thermometer in the oven on the rack and adjust accordingly. They’re <$10. Try placing it in different spots and figure out how evenly or unevenly your oven heats, and how a pan in one spot affects temperature in another.
Composition and thickness of your pan also matters. Ovens heat from all sides, but it matters whether your food is sitting in glass, steel, thin aluminum, or thick aluminum. Cake mixes try to give different instructions for glass, metal, and dark metal, but it’s going to vary by recipe.
And it matters whether you’re using a convection or conventional oven. The standard advice is shorter times and lower temperatures for convection, but you might still get differences in terms of drying out the top before the bottom and center cook fully with convection. Maybe you have to cover it part of the time, for some recipes.
If you misjudge and want more crispiness, why not briefly broil at the end? Say you’re trying to braise a roast in a pan next to, above, or below the dish of potatoes. Steam from the roast slows the cooking and prevents browning. Then when you take the roast out to rest, you have a couple of minutes to broil before serving.