This is an old school food tip, I didn’t invent it or anything, but I wonder how many of you actually do this?
I’m here to tell you that I do this. When I move into a new apartment, I buy an oven thermometer to calibrate the oven. If you don’t do that, you don’t know if your oven runs hot or cold or if it’s perfect. And since I just got started in this new kitchen, it’s something I really needed to know. So let’s buy this one from Gelson’s and see how our new oven does!
Into the oven it goes, let’s set the knob to 350.
Let’s let 15 minutes go by. Should we watch TV? Real Housewives? O.C. or New Jersey? New Jersey, right? God, that Teresa really never acknowledges her faults.
Ok, let’s check that thermometer.
Hey look at that! It’s at 350! Our oven’s perfect. Now we don’t have to adjust it up or down when we cook. We know so much about our oven, our food is always going to taste delicious.
Thanks, oven thermometer. You’re the best.
I recommend using the oven thermometer in conjunction with a tried and true recipe as check that your *thermometer* is correct. We moved into a new place with an oven that had no temp gauge at all, so the oven thermometer was quite helpful. Then we bought a new oven, and I broke the thermometer, so I bought a new one. New oven inconsistently seemed to be 25, 50, sometimes 75 degrees too hot. Gave up and called for service (yay, warranty). Oven was fine, it was the thermometer that was bad. If I were a better baker, I would have realized this sooner when cookies, etc weren’t coming out quite right despite what the oven thermometer was telling me. Oops.
I just moved into a new place with a brand new oven (shiny and beautiful!), so I’ll need to confirm that the temperature is correct with my thermometer.
However…anything will be better than the oven in my previous apartment, which was always 80-100 degrees below what I set it to (I know this because we used an oven thermometer), and the heat escaped through the door and above the stove top. So I just stopped using my oven during hot months. Plus, the highest I could set it to was 500 F (which was actually 400). Not good for pizza!
Anyway, excellent advice, because the wrong temperature of the oven could be what prevents an otherwise delicious meal/dessert.
So does anyone know how to calibrate these? You can’t just stick them in boiling water like you can w/ an instant read.
I used to trust my oven thermometer, but when my oven broke and I got it fixed, the thermometer said the oven temp was way off. But the repair guy checked it with one of those heat-reading laser guns and said the oven was dead on with the temperature stated on the dial. Now what? I decided to trust the laser gun, but part of me is always nervous. Stupid oven thermometer…
My oven seems to be working normally, but my oven thermometer recently started saying it’s 50 degrees too cold. When I listened to the thermometer nothing cooked right. I have to assume that cheap thermometers just don’t last that long. I have an infrared thermometer, but I’m never sure where I should point it to get the best reading (since you can’t check air temp, only the temp of a surface). Anyone have any ideas?
I think my new oven might run under temp a little…I will be doing this soon…thanks loads!
I move house quite a lot (not through choice, just very unlucky with amateur landlords and job moves) so I always do this. I have a fridge/freezer thermometer too, for the same reasons.
Even with a thermometer I find it always takes a while to get used to a new oven/grill, they always have hot spots/cool spots in odd places! In my new place the oven’s quite new, but the grill works really strangely – you have to bunch everything over to the left to get it to cook properly. There’s just one big element, it just gets hotter on the left side for some reason!
Forgot to add… there was one place I used to live with a gas oven which was always far too low. I thought it was just quirky and old but I should have got it checked sooner – there turned out to be a problem with the gas supply to my flat and when that was fixed (free, because it was part of the system that belonged to the gas company rather than the customer) everything suddenly started working properly!
Good so far, but now move it from dead-center and test again in a few different spots. Most ovens have hot and cooler spots, and like the pp suggested, bake something tried and true and see how it turns out. It does look like you’ve got a winner, though!