Senior staff writer Rachel Wharton, who tests large kitchen appliances, says that once you know where the hot spots are, you should stick to the areas that provide the most balanced heat, even if it means placing food away from the center of the oven, as you might not be inclined to do.
For example, when baking cakes, I often rotate the pan midway through baking to promote even cooking, since the oven I normally use is hotter on the left side.
I also avoid placing food on the periphery whenever possible, as the metal walls tend to retain and emit the most heat, often resulting in uneven cooking. And depending on what I’m making, I sometimes flip the food midway through to ensure that both sides get evenly browned.
Toast test aside, Rachel suggests recalibrating an oven if necessary, which can alter your baking results. “Determine how out of sync the internal temperature is with the temperature on the knob or dial using an oven thermometer, and then check your manual—all are online—for how to best calibrate your oven,” she says.
“My oven is 25 degrees under. So I always up a recipe by 25 degrees,” Michael notes. He recommends using an air probe thermometer to measure the ambient temperature of the oven and determine whether the temperatures are off.
Although working around hot spots and inaccurate oven temperatures isn’t ideal, such problems are mostly avoidable once you know where and how to find and fix them.
“Your oven is probably not perfect,” Michael says. But, then again, neither are people.
This article was edited by Megan Beauchamp and Maxine Builder.
