Pasta added to water before it starts to boil gets a heat start on mushiness. Pasta quickly begins to break down in tepid water as the starch dissolves. You need the intense heat of boiling water to "set" the outside of the pasta, which prevents the pasta from sticking together. That's why the fast boil is so important; the water temperature drops when you add the pasta, but if you have a fast boil, the water will still be hot enough for the pasta to cook properly.
You preheat the oven so that the cooking time is as close to accurate as possible. It takes my oven for frikkin' ever to warm up.
I wouldn't think the oven is a taste thing; it's a matter of time. Why do prep and heating serially when you can do them in parallel?
BOOM. Questions answered and this thread is done. Don't eat pasta, folks. Back to work.
But if you're just warming something up, or baking something that is basically made out of pre-cooked ingredients (like baked ziti?), the timing probably isn't that important.
4: Well, I improvised a pasta dish this morning, and it's been sitting in the fridge all day. So I was thinking I could just toss it in the oven as the oven warmed up, and whenever it looked toasty, I'd take it out.
My worry about putting things in the oven while it's pre-heating is that they will get a higher ratio of radiant heat to conduction/convention heat. I worry that the outside will singe.
Halford only uses his oven to heat the point of his spear, so he can track it as he throws it in the dead of night.
Or wait, no, he has a lovely vintage dual oven from the '30s that goes incredibly well in his kitchen and is basically irreplaceable but which also doesn't work.
How large is the pasta dish? Could you heat it in a large (covered) pan?
Rudolph the red nosed reinspear.
Convention heat is only an issue for ziti that are running for president.
7 sounds like it would work fine. And if you're putting it from the fridge directly into the oven in the same dish, definitely better not to put a cold dish into an already hot oven.
12: But then it wouldn't bake and get a nice crusty top, right?
The dinner is more likely to be a failure because of the giant clumps of spinach throughout the dish, but we'll see. I'll like it, at least.
If your pan is ovenproof you could finish it off by sprinkling on cheese and sticking it under the broiler for a minute or two. But no reason not to just use the oven for the whole thing.
So I was thinking I could just toss it in the oven as the oven warmed up, and whenever it looked toasty, I'd take it out.
What does this get you that preheating the oven doesn't?
(My food safety paranoia also says that you want to let food sit at room temperature-ish for as short a period of time as possible, so best to go from fridge to hot oven. I doubt that's really a concern for anything other than, say, homemade stock, though.)
Of course, what really matters is that you use a lid when bringing the water to a boil.
What does this get you that preheating the oven doesn't?
Wouldn't it finish earlier, because it would be absorbing some heat at least during the first 10 minutes?
(My food safety paranoia also says that you want to let food sit at room temperature-ish for as short a period of time as possible, so best to go from fridge to hot oven.
Well, I agree that you're paranoid.
20: I am so, so lax about these things. It especially drives me crazy when I read advice to put leftovers in the fridge RIGHT AWAY. What, before they're cooled down to room temperature? You want me to heat up my fridge?
With preheating the oven, it depends on what you're baking.
As mentioned, with thicker things, the top can overcook if you don't preheat. I you are doing a pizza (especially with homemade dough), you want to preheat with a cookie sheet in the oven (people fancier than I use a stone) to make sure the crust comes out right (and I'm not going to touch the Chicago v. NYC litigation). Ditto making most kinds of brad - you'll screw up the consistency if you let it warm up with the oven.
When reheating things, I tend not to care much.
I thought for way too long that the warning against putting hot food in the refrigerator was because it did something bad to the food. It just wastes energy? Screw that, I don't have a car. (Or alternatively, quantify the wastage for me.)
20.2: USDA says to refrigerate within 2 hours, or 1 hour if the room is over 90°F.
I thought for way too long that the warning against putting hot food in the refrigerator was because it did something bad to the food. It just wastes energy? Screw that, I don't have a car. (Or alternatively, quantify the wastage for me.)
Well, it also warms up the things near it in the refrigerator.
25: UR DOIN IT WRONG.
ALSO, HAS ANYONE SEEN FLUFFY?
Most recipes include times at temperatures -- if you start it at a lower temperature, it will take more time than the recipe states (and possibly mess up what you're making, depending.) If you're worried about time, preheat the oven while you prep or while you're doing other things.
With something like baked ziti it probably doesn't matter short of actually setting it on fire.
Follow-up to yesterday's argument on the geography and cities: This data visualization from the Census Bureau suggests that we have moved away from using geographically specific names and toward more abstract terminology to describe ourselves ("rural," "urban," etc.) over the last 200 years.
Not sure what I make of it, but the pictures are pretty.
(I would post this in the other thread, but it appears to be dead.)
Link: http://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/011/
Everybody liked it. That's what you for including a fuckton of parmesan cheese.
33: Apparently, you also used your last "get" to make the pasta.
I was going to ask about the fuckton unit of measurement, how large it is, but then I realized that it varies depending on the ingredient being measured. A fuckton of parmesan is a very different amount than a fuckton of cayenne.
Is 29 a quantum Zeno joke? Because, awesome.
For certain baked goods (notably pie crust, pâte feuilletée, and American biscuits), you need a preheated oven to get the right result. It's the shock of high heat on cold butter that creates the flaky goodness. Yeast breads also benefit from a preheated oven for slightly different reasons.
Every cookbook I have says that preheating is "unnecessary with today's modern ovens" and as a general rule I don't bother. You might want to add five extra minutes to compensate, I suppose, but opening the door once the oven is hot drops the temperature substantially anyway, so.
I do preheat for baking bread (or if one were doing pizza), because if you want the thing to have a good bottom crust and not stick to the pan, you want to be putting it on a hot baking sheet or stone. So preheating matters for that sort of thing.
11 -- get out of a pretty close simulacrum of my kitchen, man! Who are these people and where am I?
Our oven, admittedly not modern, is a gas one and it seems that having the actual blast of burning heat coming from the bottom makes things cook irregularly if the food goes in before the oven is preheated. Does this stop me from putting food in too early? Mais non!
A few months ago we replaced our oven with this basic GE electric and holy hell has it been an improvement. Granted it might be just mediocre and I can't tell because our old one was such a piece of shit.
This seems truly bizarre to me, just tossing something straight from the fridge into the oven without preheating the oven or bringing the food to room temp.
Mm, I'm thinking about condensation? The dish -- presumably a casserole dish -- will have condensation as it warms. That will make the resulting product mushy. I guess I'm not sure why you wouldn't just put the dish on top of the stove while the oven warms, then put it in. It wouldn't take any more time.
This guy says you don't even need to boil pasta water. Haven't tried it, though. I'm a pasta traditionalist.
I don't fuss too much over preheating the oven, except for pizza and serious baking where the chemistry is frightening. If you want to heat an oven properly, buy a thermometer. Don't trust the built-in dial.
you don't even need to boil pasta water
Sounds like contrarian cooking.
On the other hand, I was lectured once for not rinsing my rice before cooking it. Pah.
It wouldn't take any more time.
It would take slightly more time.
If time is of the essence, why not microwave it? You could always finish it off, to be toasty on top, in the oven.
What you do is you put the Ziti in your engine compartment before heading out for the day. By the time you pull into the garage, mm mm mm, toasty hot.
I guess 47 depends on whether you're going into the sun or not.
Has anyone linked yet to chicken offsets?
Time was of the essence to such a degree that we actually just ate piles of shredded parmesan, and this post was just a red herring to throw you all off my case.
Why'd you shred the parmesan? I'd just hit myself in the head with the wrapped block of cheese while crying.
If time is of the essence, why not microwave it? You could always finish it off, to be toasty on top, in the oven.
You seem to be introducing unnecessary complications. The fridge-to-cold-oven move is about not needing to intervene again between the moment of turning on the oven and the moment of pulling out all toasty. The condensation issue strikes me as a red herring -- we aren't talking about onion rings or fried chicken (in which case casserole dishes should not be involved anyhow) but something that is supposed to be soft underneath and crispy on top -- and the crispiness is produced at the end of the baking, well after any condensation has departed the scene.
Condensation on any color herring would be kind of nasty, to be fair. Always preheat your herring oven.
52: Well in that case I hope heebie is baking with a top/lid (aluminum foil probably) on the dish, and removing it before crisping up!
The microwave was a joke. Also, you're making your oven work harder by making it heat up something straight from the fridge. Uses more energy.
It's like you guys haven't made lasagna or eggplant parmesan before. There are moisture issues.
It will also take longer to bake the thing straight from the fridge into the oven (the oven will be on longer). Bring to room temp first, I say, or at least to some reasonable facsimile thereof.
Harold McGee advocates cooking pasta in cold water in a frying pan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keGCgWOceqU#t=00m11s
And you'd be hard pressed do find somebody with more authority on food and cooking than he, since he wrote the book.
Has anyone linked yet to chicken offsets?
That's hilarious, although the guy behind it is not exactly on the side of sweetness and light, cosmically speaking.
Cooking is surely one of those things that's framed by tradition. I think I was taught frugality, in use of the oven. I'd never really thought about it before, and my comments have been an attempt to think through what the rationale was supposed to be. You'll still have to wrestle me to the ground before you can get me to put something straight from the fridge into the oven, because it just has !!! all over it, for me. This may be one of those things.
I am a slave to tradition in all these regards, even in some whippersnapper at america's test kitchen tells me to make meringue with cold eggs or something. I finished the post I fell asleep on last night (really, on the dinner-in-bed tray that I passed out on) so I thought I would note it here.
56 keeps making me laugh, as that's what it looked like when a very drunk friend of mine decided to make us spaghetti. I really wanted to intervene, but decided it was more fun to watch cold water and pasta go into a frying pan and get heated up until she remembered she had started making pasta. It was fine.
|| You have to admire their nerve. |>
47: In Travels with Charlie Steinbeck talks about his laundry method during the trip which, iirc, basically involved rigging a bucket so that the clothes and soap could slosh around all day while he was driving.
47: Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine!
For certain baked goods (notably pie crust ..., you need a preheated oven
I have been wondering about this. Someone gave me a ceramic pie plate recently, and it came with instructions to never put it in a preheated oven. So how the hell do I make a pie with this thing?
I don't think you do. Is it ornamental or something? Maybe you bake pies in tinfoil pans and drop the tinfoil pan into the pretty ceramic pan?
OTOH, I can't see how anything that could take oven heat at all would mind a preheated oven, so maybe you just use it and if it breaks it was worthless anyway.
I didn't realize you don't put ceramic pie plates in the oven. I just do. Nothing bad happens, that I can tell.
Preheated, of course. Crispy crust is crucial.
Well, yes -- if L.'s plate can't take a preheated oven, it's not a normal ceramic pie plate, it's something weirdly fragile.
Ok L., you can do this. You're going to need a second pie plate identical in shape, scored on the bottom. Place the first plate in the oven as it preheats, assemble the pie in the second, and, when the oven is ready, crack the second plate neatly in two so that the formed pie falls into place in the now heated plate.
Maybe it's not ceramic? The website calls it "stoneware". It's from this place: Pottery For Living.
No, I guess stoneware is just fancy ceramic. The website says that sudden temperature change stresses ceramic over time. I wonder how long "over time" is, in terms of number of pies I can make in the normal way before it explodes.
Hmm. Not only should you put it in a pre-heated oven, but you should put it on the pre-heated cookie tin or pizza stone so that your bottom crust bakes right. I don't understand having a pie container with a heat warning.
Hmm. I have a stoneware pie dish. I've put it a preheated oven dozens of times, it seems to be doing okay.
I think pottery can be all over the place in terms of what kind of heat it can take, and it looks to me as if that brand really isn't ovensafe at all, but is trying to sell itself as ovensafe by putting conditions on how you can use it.
I think the pieplate is ornamental rather than useful. If it were me, I'd either get rid of it, or use it but expect it to break at some point.
There was some prehistoric group in (I think) central Europe that would deliberately make pottery figures such that the figures would explode when exposed to a fire. I know it is true because I have a vague memory of reading it somewhere. I think that the archeologists assumed it was some kind of intentional thing because nobody would unintentionally make pottery that badly.
L. is offering us an opportunity to actually test what people have been talking about this whole thread, whether putting stuff in the oven while it preheats get different results or not.
I'd bet it makes a big difference how long the cooking time is. I think it takes my oven a good 20 minutes to heat up to 350 or higher. Lots of recipes spend only 10 minutes or so cooking. If I don't even start my oven until a dish like that is ready to go in, then sure, I'd expect it to come out noticeably more cooked, or at least drier. On the other hand, some things cook for hours. Gradually heating up probably wouldn't make much of a difference one way or another.
Since this seems to be a general cooking thread, there are two things that have been bugging me in a minor way for a while.
* A recipe or two calls for a glass dish. We normally use some kind of ceramic. Does that matter? Would metal make a difference?
* I think in my oven the only difference between baking and broiling is the fact that baking can be at any temperature, whereas broiling just has "low" and "high" settings. (I've looked up the definition of broiling and found that it's a matter of which direction the heat comes from, but the main if not only heat source in my oven seems to be on top whether broiling or baking.) Is that normal, or am I missing some nuance in there, or what?
Broiling is just grilling, but upside down. Baking is different.
51: I'd just hit myself in the head with the wrapped block of cheese while crying.
Gosh, that's a funny way to masturbate.
78.4 - Oftentimes when a recipe calls for a glass dish, it's because it includes an ingredient that reacts with metal. Ceramic acts mostly like glass, and should be okay.
81: No, no. If a recipe asks for a glass dish, you preheat your oven to 4000° and then toss in some sand.
79: Clearly I need to stick my head inside the oven for several minutes and run my hand over all sides of it while it's on to better determine which direction the heat is coming from, then, because it seems to me like the heat is coming from the top whether I have it set to bake or broil.
83. I think Moby means the dish goes upside down. Poster tape may help, or magnets.
red herring
For years I misread the words "Cherry Heering" as "cherry herring." This was years before I knew what a Singapore Sling was supposed to taste like. Not at all fishy!
83: Late coming to this, but does this have something to do with having a convection oven? Whatever a convection oven does that makes it, erm, convect involves circulating the heat around and around (when baking), so maybe the heat can still come from the top as long as it's, you know, convecting, i.e. baking. Whereas if you're broiling, the heat will come from the top as always, but the convection function turns off. ?
I learned a while back that a convection oven* needs a vent, which is generally the right back burner -- I observe that heat does indeed come pouring out from the stovetop's right back burner. This turned out to be important because you mustn't put something on the right back burner while you're baking, else you'll block the vent and mess up the convection system. An appliance repair guy told me this.
* I thought all modern ovens were convection ovens, to tell you the truth.
29: ALSO, HAS ANYONE SEEN FLUFFY?
85: Cherry Heering can't go bad, can it? I've got most of a bottle that I've had since probably 2000 or 2001. Haven't opened it in forever. It's got the cork topper.
Was there a genie in the bottle and that's all you could think to ask for?
Marge: "Homer, your job called. They said if you're not there on Friday, don't bother coming in on Monday."
Not really relevant, just one of my favorite references.
Hey, I haven't checked sports websites today. I know there were rumors of a trade yesterday, what could be going on?
92: And I post every three years or so if I have something to say or not.