Categories
General

Cooking with Science

For the last couple of years, I’ve cooked lots of bread. Mostly, I’ve been creating my own recipes and cooking the bread “until it’s done”. But when I follow recipes, like the ones in this awesome book it’s clear than my gas oven is way hotter than it’s meant to be. Sometimes bread takes days to prepare, and I reaallly don’t want to burn it! So, out with the science and in with an oven thermometer!

Here’s what the temperature did when set to gas mark 6 … which should be 200C:
Gas Mark 6

I always knew that electric ovens take ages to heat up, but I was surprised to see that even gas ovens take about 10 mins to get up to temperature. However, the oven didn’t just heat up to 200C. It kept going … and going … all the way up to 228C. In old money, that’s gas mark 8, a full 2 marks above what I’d set.

I checked a few other settings, and it was pretty consistently out by two:
My Oven

I had always assumed that ‘gas mark’ was a funky old scale, but thanks to wikipedia and R’s plot function, it’s clearly nicely linear:

Gas Mark vs C

So, this is all useful information to help cook tasty things. But it’s a little bit tempting to also measure how quickly the oven cools down, and thereby model heat-loss. Or, to use the gas meter to see how much energy is going in, thereby indirectly measuring the average heat capacity of the (empty) oven. And so on …

Or, I could make some more bread. 🙂

2 replies on “Cooking with Science”

Ah now… what you really need is closed loop PID control; then you can directly set the target temperature and the over will sit there quite happily (and adjust for things like the door being opened); other benefits would be getting up to temperature more quickly (the controller, once tuned, should apply a large impulse to get a quick change before bringing the input back down)…

Heh, I can just imagine a computer thinking “hey, I need to gain 200C as quickly as possible” and sending off a sneaky internet order for some thermite …

Comments are closed.