Oven temperature

Anyone know or have any ideas on how to accuratley measure oven temperature? What kind of temperatures should I see? Does it work like a furnace where it goes on then slowly cools then turns on again?

Thanks

If I understand your question, you could use a regular oven thermometer to measure oven temp. Set it in the middle of a rack that's placed in the middle "shelf" of the oven. Turn the oven on to, say, 250 degrees. Give it 10 minutes to heat up, then check the temp. on the oven thermometer. Then increase the heat to 350 or 400, wait 10 minutes, check the temp.

Checking the heat at different temperatures should give you a good idea if the oven dial is correct. If it's off by 5 or 10 degrees, you can either recalibrate it (I've seen how-to instructions online) or compensate for the difference by increasing/decreasing the temperature on the dial.

The oven thermometer I bought at Target for ~$4 is one of the best kitchen purchases I've ever made. I knew the crappy oven in my apartment was off because I was burning things - turns out it was >100 degrees off. On the plus side, it can get to 600 degrees no problem...

I'd wait 20-30 mins instead of just 10. That way, you can be extra sure that the oven is done heating and at the temperature it thinks it is before taking the reading. Sometimes my oven thinks its at 350 due to the location of the built in guage but the oven thermometer placed where the actual cookware would go doesn't get there for another 5-10 mins.

Is there a service that can recalibrate an oven? I'm too scared to do it myself.

Pie Lady wrote:Is there a service that can recalibrate an oven? I'm too scared to do it myself.

I'm sure you know this already, but just in case...I think the most common and inexpensive thing to do is to simply take the temperature of the oven once it is fully preheated; then figure out how how much hotter or cooler the oven runs, and then set your oven accordingly. For example, set the oven to 350. Wait an hour. Take the temperature inside the oven. If it is at 340, then you know your oven runs about 10 degrees to cool. So when a recipe calls for cooking something at 350, set your oven to 360. You can obviously be more precise by taking the temperature at a range of values (i.e. 300, 350, 400, 450) and also checking that when you bump it up to a 360 (for example) it actually runs at 350.

But if you want to actually have your thermometer fixed/replaced, I would imagine that any appliance repair service can do the job.

Yep, that's what we did. Set it to 350, put an oven thermometer in. An hour later it was reading 375, so we used the oven's menus to adjust its internal thermostat up 25 degrees.

I have been doing that, it's been running 25 degrees low, but yesterday it seemed it was worse, like 35 degrees. Then I turned it up just a hair more, and my cookies were burnt; the temp was now 25 over.

Could very well be a faulty thermostat, then.. they're often pretty easy and cheap to replace on your own. Find the $10 part on ebay, remove the old one (usually a couple screws and a connector to unplug) and then pop in the new one.