It’s Time to Get the Oven Ready for Thanksgiving
Luck may favor the brave, but Thanksgiving favors the prepared. Preparing your oven for Turkey Day in the last week of October may seem like overkill, but it can be tricky to schedule repairmen (it can take weeks to get you home!) And it’s best to spot any oven problems ahead of time so as not to exacerbate the peak holiday stress. Check your oven for potential problems now, and you’ll have plenty of time to fix them before the pie baking season begins.
Make sure it doesn’t lie next to the thermometer in the oven
First, make sure your oven isn’t lying. Baking is a kind of exercise in confidence: you press a few buttons to set the temperature, the oven tells you when it has reached that temperature, and you put the food in the oven without ever questioning the appliance’s claims.
A few degrees of deviation from the norm is not the biggest problem, especially if all you do is fry vegetables and bake potatoes. But large deviations in temperature can cause problems, especially with more finicky baking projects, dishes with long cooking times (like the giant ceremonial bird), and new recipes.
It is very easy to check the accuracy of the temperature display in the oven: take an oven thermometer and use it. Your oven’s internal thermometer only reads the temperature where it was installed, usually at the back or front. Food, as you know, is not cooked in the back or front of the oven – it is cooked in the center. So take an external thermometer and put it in there . (From a brand standpoint, Cook’s Illustrated recommends this basic, very cheap watch face model, but you can also use a digital gauge model from Thermoworks , for example.)
Place a thermometer (or thermometer probe) in the center of the oven and set the temperature to 350 ℉. Once the oven reports that it has reached the target temperature, check your thermometer and write down the actual value. Repeat every 15 minutes for two hours, then take the average by adding all the readings together and dividing the total by the number of readings – this is your oven temperature. (The averaging will take into account any fluctuations caused by cyclic switching, i.e. switching the oven off and on to maintain the set temperature.)
If your oven has been lying down all the time, you can set it level by adjusting the oven temperature dial. The steps will be slightly different for each brand and model of oven, so refer to your user manual. (ThermPro has a procedure circuit here , but I cannot guarantee that this is directed towards the oven in the kitchen.)
Check for hotspots with coconut and bread
Even if your oven gives an accurate temperature reading, it is unlikely that the entire oven is at the same temperature in every place. Most ovens have hot and cold spots, and you can map them using shredded coconut .
To make a card, place 350 ℉ in the oven and sprinkle the chopped coconut on a baking sheet evenly. Place the baking sheet in the oven and notice which spots brown the fastest (and slowest).
If you want to map your broiler in the same way, take a bunch of sliced bread, place it on a baking sheet (or directly on the wire rack) and let the slices brown, noting which slices brown the fastest.
Check the charts as needed to ensure that your tasty meals are not overcooked, undercooked, or burnt.
Clean up this damn thing
If you’re not doing anything else to prepare your oven for Thanksgiving, at least clean it thoroughly. Old stuck food and greasy stains can smoke or catch fire and spoil your food (and in some extreme cases, your entire oven), so get rid of them.
The self-cleaning function can be used sparingly to burn off accumulated debris (make sure all grease is removed first so as not to ignite grease), but if you don’t or don’t have it. If you don’t want to use it, you can deal with it with ammonia, dishwashing detergent, and baking soda. (Watch the video above for how to do this.)