Turn off the oven or leave it on? Gaps between baking.

[LizD518]

I'm baking three different items this morning with slightly different temperatures ranging from 325* to 375*. If I had really planned things out I could have prepped everything before I even turned on the oven, but it was in the middle of the first item and had doubts about how it would turn out (pretty well actually) so I decided to make a couple of small batches of cookies on the fly.

So I took the first item out, peach-apricot-rosemary turnovers, and turned the oven down to 350*, but still needed to make the chocolate chip cookie dough and then chill it a bit and it will end up being about 45 minutes before I put them in the oven. Am I better off turning the oven of in between, or just letting it go? It is a gas oven and only a few years old so it heats up pretty quickly.

[Smithy]

I'd save the gas, and turn it off.  

[Lisa Shock]

Once you have some warmth in there, it will probably only take 5-10 minutes for the oven to rebound and come up to the temp you need. No need to leave it on for 45 minutes between items.

 

BTW, this is the perfect time to make some extras to take advantage of the heat and make cooking easier later. You could put garlic heads in foil and roast them, make a tray of roasted potatoes or vegetables for dinner now or in the next few days. If you have tons of tomatoes or fruit, dehydrating them in the oven is good prep for sauces or pies of the future. There are a lot of things you can make with maybe 5-10 minutes of prep.

[rosik929]

I would turn it off in between cooking times; you may actually get a more accurate baking temperature each time.  The oven temperature tends to rise over long baking periods, even if the temperature is left alone and not adjusted; a 45 minute wait period between each baking time could result in the second baking time having a significantly higher baking temperature.  I do not think that this would be desirable for that batch.

[weinoo]

I'd leave it on.

[Tri2Cook]

I'd leave it on.

Me too. I don't have gas (well, not for my appliances anyway) so I could be wrong but I'd think it would take as much or more gas to reheat the oven as it would take to maintain the temp of an already heated oven for that short amount of time.

 

[weinoo]

That's my explanation too - it was just too early for me to write it!

 

Also, if the oven is at temp, most of the time the gas is off.

[dcarch]

1. It depends on how good the even is insulated. You can find out by putting a remote read thermometer inside and see how fast the temperature drops.

 

2. It depends how the oven's thermometer works. Some oven's thermostat goes way above set temperature each time it tries to get up to your set temperature before it stablizes.

 

dcarch

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