Oven Mistakes You Didn’t Know You Were Making | Techniquely with Lan Lam



Getting to know your oven is essential to achieve successful results in the kitchen — Lan shows you how to avoid the most common oven mistakes.

Get our Thin-Crust Pizza recipe:
Get our Cast Iron Pan Pizza recipe:
Get our Broiled Smashed Zucchini with Garlicky Yogurt recipe:
The Truth About Cooking with Convection:

Buy our winning pizza stone:
Buy our winning pizza cutter:
Buy our winning wire rack:
Buy our winning cast iron:
Buy our winning half baking sheet:
Browse more Techniquely content:

Follow Lan on Instagram:

ABOUT US: The mission of America’s Test Kitchen (ATK) is to empower and inspire confidence, community, and creativity in the kitchen. Founded in 1992, the company is the leading multimedia cooking resource serving millions of fans with TV shows (America’s Test Kitchen, Cook’s Country, and America’s Test Kitchen: The Next Generation), magazines (Cook’s Illustrated and Cook’s Country), cookbooks, a podcast (Proof), FAST channels, short-form video series, and the ATK All-Access subscription for digital content. Based in a state-of-the-art 15,000-square-foot test kitchen in Boston’s Seaport District, ATK has earned the trust of home cooks and culinary experts alike thanks to its one-of-a-kind processes and best-in-class techniques. Fifty full-time (admittedly very meticulous) test cooks, editors, and product testers spend their days tweaking every variable to find the very best recipes, equipment, ingredients, and techniques. Learn more at

If you like us, follow us:

source

Similar Posts

34 Comments

  1. Regarding pre-heating: All of your examples involve food that takes far less than an hour to cook. There is no reason to pre-heat when cooking items like pork ribs or whole cuts of beef that require an hour or more to cook. Even if you're dealing with a situation where you want an initial high temperature to get a Maillard reaction on the external surface (such as a "standing" rib roast) and then lower the temperature to complete cooking the interior. My oven reaches its set point in under ten minutes — even when that set point is 450 degrees. There is very little point waiting for the temperature to reach that set point if the food is going to be in the oven for an hour or more. Other than that nit-pick I agree with everything else in this video.

  2. I've been watching YT cooking videos for nearly 15 years, and I feel like I hear the same tips over and over again these days. Lan is one of the few professionals who brings fresh ideas to the table in anway that's approachable for home cooks, and perfectly balanced betwen technical specificity and high level purpose and function. You are amazing, Lan, thank you!

    I'd love to see a video on fish – slow roasting, pan searinf, broiling; when, why, how, and for what fish?

  3. Chef, I would love for you to do a whole video of convection oven tips. The place I just moved into has this high-tech oven with a variety of convection settings – I'm pretty tech-friendly myself and pretty bold about experimenting but could definitely use all the help I can get! 😀 Also, as a fan of zucchini, I totally thank you for that smashed-zucchini technique.

  4. My oven was taking forever to preheat. Had an electrician check the voltage and a repair tech check the heating element. Turned out the problem was having my pizza stone on the bottom rack. Moving it to the middle allowed the oven to heat much faster. Ever run into something like that?

  5. I have a steam bake feature that I like to use when baking cakes and breads. It even has a proofing setting. But no recipes exist that take advantage of the feature so I’m left with a lot of guesswork.

    I do enjoy the convection bake and convection roast features of my oven. Today was the first time I’ve heard anyone address their use. Thanks for sharing your wisdom.

  6. Always like seeing Lan's tips! I'm glad she didn't suggest that once an oven reaches temperature that you need to let it continue to preheat for x minutes. I've always felt that is a inexcusable waste of energy when you see a recipes that say to preheat the oven to x temperature and then wait an extra 10-15 minutes.

  7. My concern is that oven calibration is a very real issue, but trusting a cheap little crude thermometer is supposed to be a solution. If an oven engineered well and costs sometimes thousands of dollars loses calibration, why wouldn’t the thermometer have even more potential to be misread. There have been tests for example in The Cake Bible there is some basic yellow cake that is supposed to be at a certain state in a certain time if the temperature is 350. If it’s less baked, then the oven is too cool. If it’s over baked (too brown and pulled away from pan) it’s too hot. You can then adjust the oven yourself with the owner’s manual. If it’s an old analog control, Kristen take the knob off and find an adjustment there that can be made with a screwdriver. Also some expensive ovens have heating elements cycling top, bottom, sides, and convection which is the difference between bake and roast. It gets more and more complicated.

Leave a Reply