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  • Mad Engineeringmadengineering@hachyderm.io
    Sep 8, 2026, 9:25 PM

    Fun fact about cooking, have you ever noticed how a lot of recipes call for a temperature of 350 degrees? Why this number?

    Before electrically cooked ovens, most recipes called for a "low oven," a "moderate oven," or a "high oven." Low oven would have been warmed by glowing embers, moderate oven would have had wood with obviously visible flames, and high oven would have been throw wood in until you can't stand being within three feet of the cooking surface.

    When electrically controlled ovens arrived that could be set to precise temperatures, recipes that called for "low oven" got "translated" into 250 degrees Farenheit (121 C), "moderate oven" got "translated" to 350 F (176C), and "high oven" got "translated" to 500F (260C).

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Replies

  • ck0ck0@tech.lgbt
    Sep 9, 2026, 8:06 AM

    @madengineering Is your oven temperature really that exact ? Mine is not at all, I have to check all the time how food is cooked into it.

    I've also cooked with a bunch of propane ovens, and while they have indicative temperatures on the buttons, it really wasn't meant threated like that but more like low, medium and high. Temperature wouldn't be at all distributed, there were no thermal probe, it was dependant of how much the propane can was filed, etc.

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  • Garrett Wollmanwollman@mastodon.social
    Sep 10, 2026, 4:27 AM

    @ck0 @madengineering Oven thermostats cycle on and off, obviously, and so there has to be a bit of hysteresis so it's not constantly and inefficiently cycling. But a good oven is heating/measuring the thermal mass of the sides of the chamber and not just the air, so you have some inertia and you have radiant heating on all six sides. But recipes, if the publisher is competent, are tested on both good and bad quality ovens.

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