Helen, Help Me: How to Recalibrate Your Kitchen
I think of myself as a good cook. I host dinner parties regularly, and I successfully tackle ambitious recipes. But for some reason I can’t for the life of me figure out baking. My cakes, breads, pastries, and cookies always come out dry and hard. I’m doing everything right, I think: I measure my ingredients by weight, I make sure I’m using the right kind of flour, my eggs and butter are at room temp. What gives? Am I cursed? —Anonymous, N.Y.C.
I’m not much of a superstitious person, but for a long time I, too, believed that I was culinarily cursed. Specifically, I thought that I was the angel of yeastly death, because for a period of several years any yeast-risen dough or batter I made—for breads, rolls, babkas, waffles—would puff up a little bit, and then give up, collapse, and sit there in the bowl like a sulky blob of slime. Every time I opened the freezer to scoop out a few grams of instant yeast from the glass pint jar into which I’d decanted my supply, hope blossomed in my heart: maybe this time? I worried that it was karma, or that it was punishment. I worried, for a while, slightly insanely, that the skin of my hands carried some kind of natural antibacterial aura that was murderous to natural leavening, and that maybe I should get in touch with science about it. It wasn’t until one day, when I surprised myself by producing a spectacularly fluffy focaccia in a kitchen that wasn’t my own, using someone else’s ingredients, that I realized the truth was much more mundane, and that I was a silly fool: I wasn’t killing the yeast—the yeast was already dead!
The moral of this story is twofold. One: if your yeast isn’t working, do not spend years returning to the same batch of yeast. Two, and to your point, and with apologies to Sherlock Holmes: if you’ve accounted for everything within your control, then the problem must be something outside of it. If you’re following all the recipe’s directions properly, and all of your baking attempts are still coming out hard and dry, this means you’re either baking things too long—unlikely, because if you can manage kitchen scales I’m pretty sure you can manage a stopwatch—or you’re baking them too hot. When was the last time you calibrated the temperature of your oven? Was it never? I have a feeling it might be never.
The great news is that this is easy to remedy. You’re going to buy an oven thermometer—this OXO one is durable and easy to read, and has a well-designed hook that keeps it securely attached to the oven rack. (I’ve found that other brands tend to wobble and tumble at the slightest nudge.) Then you’re going to pop it in as close to the dead center of your oven as you can, and run a handful of tests. Set your oven to two-fifty; when it comes to temp, check the thermometer. Hold the oven at two-fifty for about ten minutes, and check the thermometer again. (If your oven runs cold, this will help you figure out how long it takes to actually get to the proper temperature—keep checking, and timing, until you reach the target temp.) Every oven is its own special, finicky creature: my oven runs about twenty-five degrees too hot at lower temperatures, and about twenty-five degrees too cold above four hundred. So you’ll want to repeat this experiment at three hundred and fifty Fahrenheit, and again at four-fifty or four-seventy-five. I have a feeling you’ll be shocked by the degree to which your oven has been lying to you, undermining you, sabotaging you. Going forward, don’t trust a word that that villainous appliance says: trust only the temperature on your third-party thermometer.
Helen, Help Me!
E-mail your questions about dining, eating, and anything food-related, and Helen may respond in a future newsletter.
If you want to go a step further into hot-box calibration, you can figure out your oven’s hot spots and cool spots by way of a fun little toast test. For this, you’ll need a loaf of cheap sliced bread. Position two or three oven racks at even intervals and heat the oven to three-fifty. Once the oven comes to temp (according to your new thermometer!), evenly position six slices of bread directly on each rack. Let them bake until the pieces closest to the center are a perfect golden color, ten or fifteen minutes, and then pull out the racks and take a gander at the results. Unless your oven is some sort of magical zillion-dollar gyro-calibrated wonder, you’ll notice that some of the corner pieces look barely touched, and others are charred nearly black. Congratulations—you now know where your oven’s hot and cold spots are, and can rotate your cupcake pans and braising pots accordingly.
If all this has sent you into a weights-and-standards frenzy, and you want more, more, more, here are some other tests that I have embarked upon over the years to gain a more perfect understanding of my kitchen and my tools, ordered from least to most embarrassing: