Why preheat ovens

Apply it to pie dough , in which the flour structure needs heat to set itself before all the butter melts. Preheat the oven. This might be difficult advice for those of us who prefer a looser approach in the kitchen.

But fear not, for we've got casseroles on our side. Entire classes of savory foods that don't need to get any sort of lift, that just need to sit in the heat for a while until they're cooked through—recipes that are on the wet side, with ingredients that need to sit and marinate in each other for a long time, low-and-slow recipes.

Straight into the room-temperature oven it goes! We skip it because there's an upside to not wasting time with preheating: Food that's ready quicker!

By the way, this is a common misconception. We'd be remiss if we didn't point out that not preheating your oven can actually make food take longer to cook. What's more is that we skip this step despite the known downsides of not preheating: Soggier pizza crust.

Chicken that looks Cookies that don't rise quite right. But, less-crispy crust and sad-looking chicken aside, is there a food safety drawback to putting raw meat into an oven before it's fully heated? There's a reason we keep perishable foods either really cold or really hot and not the lukewarm temperatures in between.

This is the temperature range in which any microbes that may be present on raw food can grow most rapidly. Preheating an oven is especially important with baking when you use yeast, baking soda and baking powder as leavenings — which react to heat. In our professional kitchen, the first one to arrive always pre-heats the ovens, so they are ready for all of us to use right away.

Preheating is not a waste of energy, it is vital to being a good steward of your delicious ingredients. The stove has a thermostat that will keep the oven at the desired temperature, so if you set the temperature for degrees and the stove reaches degrees, it will stop heating and stop using power or fuel until the heat drops below degrees and the heating elements start back up and cycle on again. Opening the door to the oven too often lets a lot of the heat escape.

And in general, anything that needs to rise—bread, biscuits, egg dishes, etc. Take biscuits, for example. A burned-yet-gooey biscuit sounds both terrible and wholly confusing. That almost sounds worse than the botched biscuits. The exception: braised meats. Bringing up the heat slowly by sticking your meat in the oven and then turning it on helps the meat fibers break down at a better rate than if you were to stick the meat into an already hot oven, explains Rynecki.

There are additional things you can do when using an oven to ensure your food is cooked as deliciously and thoroughly as possible. For one, keep the oven door shut throughout the cooking process, says Rynecki.