Oven which rack to use

My cake usually get drak brown and crusty. I use to bake on the last rack. Thank you for info. Your email address will not be published. This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Another fine holiday season that started off for me, at least with more candy corn than I ever knew I could eat. As we ease towards the Thanksgiving and winter holidays please go easy, November — here are a the TEN best things to bake in November.

Read More. My plans mostly involve you making an absolute mess of your kitchen with butter, flour, chopped pecans and chocolate chips. Hi friends! The question is simple but the answer might surprise and can improve your home baking really quite a lot. New Orleans Search. Comments Will moving a cake to another rack during baking result in a sink hole?

Method : 6 pizzas will be cooked successively on a pizza stone preheated for at least 45 minutes. Each pizza will be cooked with the stone on a different rack: top, upper, middle, lower, bottom, and one with the stone directly on the oven floor.

Each pizza will be cooked for exactly 5 minutes. In order to make sure that any temperature differences in the way the stone preheats in various rack settings are accounted for, the stone will be allowed to rest at room temperature in between tests for 30 minutes before being placed back in the oven for preheating.

Total time for each test: 1 hour 20 minutes. Total time for all testing 7 hours 30 minutes 1'20" x 6 - 30" no resting for the first pie. Since 9pm is the usual time for kitchen testing to commence, it's gonna be a late one.

Note to self: Look into slipping sleeping pill's into wife and dogs food to avoid late night post-baking confrontations. During each test, the temperature of the stone will be taken by whipping out the exceedingly sexy instant-read infrared thermometer, pointing the laser sight at the center of the stone, and making a "piu piu piu" noise. The temperature of the top of each pizza will be taken after it has finished baking using the same method. Data : There were some very interesting results indeed.

First off, a look at the bottoms of the pies:. It's clear that the pizza baked on the very bottom of the oven severely overcooked within its 5 minute baking time. What's interesting is that the gradation between the pizza on the very top and the pizza in the middle is not so severe—indeed, they've achieved a pretty close to identical amount of browning. Now here are the tops of the same pies:.

It's no surprise that the pizza cooked on the top shelf browned better on top, but again, what's interesting to me is that pizza cooked in the middle and on the bottom browned nearly as well—this time it's the top rack pizza that's the outlier.

Why is this? Before we get to the pretty little diagrams, let's talk briefly about heat, what it really means, and how it gets transferred from one place to another. The biggest misconception that a lot of people have is the correlation between heat and temperature. Heat is energy that is transferred from one body to another. So when you place a steak in a pan in order to cook it, what you are really doing is transferring energy from the pan-burner system to the steak system.

This added energy partially goes to raising the temperature of the steak, but much of it also gets used up for other reactions: it takes energy to make moisture evaporate. The chemical reactions that take place that cause browning require enrgy. Temperature is a system of measurement which allows us to quantify how much energy is in a given body based on its thermal characteristics, most importantly, its heat capacity.

Depending on its density and the materials it's made out of, different bodies take different amounts of energy to change their temperatures by the same number of degrees. Conversely, this means that given the same mass and temperature, water will contain about 10 times as much energy as iron and air about half as much.

Not only that, but remember that air is far less dense than water, which means that the amount of heat energy contained in a given volume of air at a given temperature will be only a small fraction of the amount of energy contained in the same volume of water at the same temperature. So let's say that your rack is in a fairly average position: right in the middle. How does food actually cook on there? This diagram represents a head-on view of your oven with a pizza stone sitting on a rack.

The blue arrows represent air currents in the oven, while the red arrows represent radiation. Heat energy gets transferred to food via three different methods:. Conduction is the direct transfer of energy from one solid body to another.

In pizzas, this occurs on the spots where the dough is in direct contact with the stone or oven floor. Although it may seem like the entire bottom surface of a pizza is in direct contact with the stone, in fact, as soon as you place it down, bubbles of steam and air rapidly form underneath the surface, elevating it.

The dough actually only touches the stone in a few spots. Since conduction is an extremely efficient form of heat transfer, those spots of contact cook rapidly and eventually develop into the nice charred spots you get on a well-cooked pie.

Convection is the transfer of one solid body to another through the intermediary of a fluid that is, either a liquid or a gas. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance.

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