Whether you’re baking cookies or heating up a frozen pizza, the cooking instructions always specify you should preheat the oven before sliding in your pan. If you’re like me, you’ve been too impatient to wait until the oven is finished preheating. So is preheating an electric oven really necessary?
Preheating an electric oven is necessary for almost all foods you cook or bake. Many foods need to be immediately exposed to a consistent high oven temperature to activate ingredients or cook evenly.
It’s especially important to preheat your electric oven if you’re cooking something made from a batter or dough containing baking soda, baking powder, or yeast because a blast of hot air is necessary for the leavening agents to activate. Baked goods such as bread, cookies, and cakes may not rise properly in a cold oven.
Baked items with butter also need a preheated oven. Otherwise, the butter may start melting before the other ingredients start cooking. Butter starts to melt when the temperature reaches about 82 degrees. If your cookies are turning out flat and are spread out like pancakes on the cookie sheet, you haven’t preheated the oven well enough.
A good guide for deciding whether preheating is necessary is to examine the ingredients. If the food contains flour, a leavening agent, or eggs, you must preheat the oven for a successful outcome. Dishes where eggs feature prominently, such as soufflés, quiches, and meringues, are likely to literally “fall flat” unless the oven is sufficiently hot when they’re put in it.
For a few dishes, preheating is still a good idea but not crucial to success. Foods such as casseroles can be put into the oven at any time. You may not need to preheat the oven for frozen convenience foods, either, even if the directions state it. Most of these products are meant to be cooked in either a conventional oven or a microwave, and you don’t preheat a microwave. However, if there are parts of the food you want to be browned or crisp—the crust of a frozen pizza, for example—you’ll want to preheat.
What Does Preheating an Oven Really Mean?
Recipes will tell you to preheat the oven, but they don’t often tell you what that means. If you’re new to cooking or baking, or if you’re new to using an electric oven, you may not know what to do to start the preheating process. Let’s take a closer look at how it’s done.
Preheating an electric oven involves turning on the oven and selecting your desired cooking temperature, and then waiting until the oven heats up to that level. Electric ovens contain a heating coil that gradually becomes hotter and causes the air in the oven to heat up, also.
The control panels of ovens vary, but all of them will allow you to select a temperature by pushing a button or turning a dial. Depending on the style of your electric oven, you may also need to push a start button. Most ovens made within the last decade are built with a signal or an indicator, such as a beep or light, to let you know when the preheating is finished and the oven is ready.
If your oven doesn’t have a signal, or if it’s not functioning, set your timer for 15 minutes or a little longer for higher temperatures. You can also buy an oven thermometer to be absolutely certain the inside of the oven is hot enough. Once the target temperature is reached, sensors in the oven will keep the temperature at a steady level.
How Long Do You Preheat an Electric Oven?
Waiting for the oven to preheat can seem like an eternity, and you may be tempted to “cheat” by putting your food in before the preheating cycle is finished. Electric ovens often do take longer than gas ovens to heat up, just because of the way they are made. It might be easier for you if you know how long your oven might take to preheat.
An electric oven will take about 10-15 minutes to preheat, depending on how high you set the temperature and other factors. Temperatures higher than the average cooking level of 350 degrees will take a few minutes longer.
Other factors also come into play, especially with an electric oven. Older ovens may also take longer because they tend to be less insulated, especially around the door seal. If you think your oven is taking longer than normal to preheat, you may have a mechanical defect that needs to be checked out. Heating coils and temperature sensors can wear out over time.
Although electric ovens heat up more slowly than gas ovens, they also cool down more slowly. If you recently used your oven and it hasn’t been off for very long, there may be enough lingering heat to give it a “head start” in preheating to the temperature you want. Cold ovens will take longer to preheat than ovens that are already partly warm.
Resist the temptation to put your food in while your electric oven is in the process of preheating. Opening the oven door allows the heated air to escape. This has the effect of cooling down the temperature inside the oven and sets the preheating process back, thus increasing the time it will take to rise to the correct temperature. Set the timer and do something else while you are waiting.
Turning up the temperature will not make your oven preheat more quickly. An electric oven’s heating coil will heat up at the same rate whether you put your oven on 250 degrees or 400 degrees.
Is It Bad To Not Preheat an Electric Oven?
Chances are, you’ve cooked many dishes in your electric oven without preheating or waiting until the preheating process is over, and the food has turned out just fine. That’s probably because you cooked food that didn’t need to start in a hot oven, or maybe you were just lucky.
You don’t need to preheat an electric oven if you’re cooking casseroles or dishes made primarily of meat, pasta, or vegetables. If you’re reheating leftovers, it’s also okay not to preheat.
If you’re cooking meat such as a roast or chicken, the cooking process doesn’t require a preheated oven. If you do, keep in mind that you may not get an appetizing, golden-brown surface and caramelized taste if starting with a cold oven. It’s a good idea to first brown your meat briefly in a frying pan before placing it into the oven. However, since pre-frying your meat takes about the same time as preheating your oven, you might as well turn the oven on, too.
Other foods that cook slowly, such as vegetables or pasta dishes such as lasagna, can go into a cold oven without harming the cooking process or end result. But, just as with meat, if you want a crisper surface—say, with broasted potatoes—you might not want to skip the preheating stage. Any sauces that need to caramelize might do better in a preheated oven, also.
In any case, keep in mind that not preheating the oven can add to your total cooking time. Even though it’s not bad to skip the preheating process for some foods, you are still putting your food into a cold oven that needs time to heat up to the correct cooking temperature. Count on adding 10-15 minutes (the time that preheating usually takes) to your cooking time.
Preheating an oven may seem like an inconvenience, especially if you want to eat in a hurry. But skipping the preheating stage may mean you have to wait even longer to dig into that juicy pot roast or baked ziti with cheese.