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Modern ovens have made baking the most reliable way to prepare a guaranteed delicious meal with a minimum of hassle. I just put fish, vegetables or meat in a preheated oven, “forgot” about it for a period of 10 minutes to several hours – and voila, you have a full dinner ready without additional body movements. If you randomly open any recipe that involves baking in the oven, it will most likely show a temperature in the range of 180 to 220 degrees, or even higher. This method has both advantages and several disadvantages.
Pros and cons of baking in the oven
The main distinguishing feature of baking in the oven (let’s call it traditional) is the used temperature, which is much higher than the cooking temperature of the product, which we strive for. It does not matter if you want to get a juicy Medium Rare roast beef (cooked temperature – 55 degrees) or further from sin, you prefer to fry the meat completely (the temperature of readiness is 70 degrees): both the one and the other result are equally far from the range of 180-220 degrees. To put it figuratively, we use a hydraulic press to hammer in a small stud. Why does this happen? Baking at a high temperature has several advantages, the main ones of which are:
- Time… The connecting link between the heat source and the products that are placed in the oven is air, and as you know (or don’t know) from the school physics course, air has an extremely low thermal conductivity and low heat capacity. This means that it slowly heats up by itself and slowly heats up what it comes into contact with. That is why we can steam in a bath at a temperature of about 100 degrees, and the roast beef, which is taken out of the oven, remains juicy and pink on the cut. However, in the same way, this means that we need to set the temperature well above the desired cooking temperature, otherwise we will have to wait for ages.
- Convenience… What does a good, mouth-watering roast beef look like, since I’ve taken it as an example? Yes, inside it is juicy and pink – but its surface should be rosy, fried, appetizing. This fry is a direct consequence of the Maillard reaction, during which, when the temperature reaches 120 degrees and above, caramelization of sugars occurs. By roasting meat at a high temperature, we create suitable conditions for this reaction, which allows you to do without additional frying: everything happens right in the oven, without any extra effort on your part.
- Supervision… The word “forgot” in the first paragraph of this article, I put it in quotation marks for a reason: you will not be able to forget about the chicken or fish being baked in the oven. Otherwise, having missed by some half an hour, you risk getting an unedible dish, or even a completely full baking sheet of coals. What is most offensive, this process is irreversible, the stuffing, as was sung in the old song, cannot be turned back.
- Evaporation… Cooking above 100 degrees has another consequence, and you know exactly what I’m talking about, even if you didn’t have an A in physics. At this temperature, the water evaporates, and if we are talking about the water contained in the product itself, it will become drier as a result. It is very easy to overdry a piece of meat or fish, ducklings and molds with a lid help – but exactly what they help, and do not completely remove the problem.
- Temperature difference… It still exists, and the heat capacity with thermal conductivity does not cancel this fact. While we use a meat thermometer to measure the temperature in the center of our roast beef, its outer layers are exposed to much more extreme heat and dry quickly. In a well-cooked roast beef, this layer of overdried meat will be thin and will not prevent us from eating our piece with pleasure, but if you miss a little – and that’s it, put out the light.
All these disadvantages can be combined into one – “If you do not look after what is cooked in the oven, you can spoil the food” – and, of course, the advantages of traditional baking in most cases outweigh it. But there is also an opportunity to go the other way – to reduce the temperature and increase the cooking time. Several cooking methods follow this principle.
Low temperature cooking
Low-temperature cooking in all its variety usually operates with temperatures ranging from 50 (lower is no longer baking, but light heating) to 100 degrees, that is, not above the boiling point (and, which is much more important for us, active evaporation) of water. You probably know the main types of low-temperature baking:
Boiling and stewing
Cooking food in liquid allows you not to worry too much about drying it out: for this, the liquid in which you are boiling or stewing must first dry out or, more precisely, evaporate, and this is much easier to track than to measure the moisture content in a piece of meat.
Water bath cooking
The products (usually liquid or at least viscous) are transferred to a container, which is placed in another container filled with water. You don’t have to worry about overheating – the water that surrounds the container with food on all sides will not let them heat up above 100 degrees until it evaporates completely. This is how desserts and pates are prepared, and you can read about the water bath in all details here.
Steam cooking
The products are placed over boiling water and covered with a lid that does not release steam, forcing it to circulate inside. As a result, the products are cooked at a temperature of about 100 degrees, do not dry out and do not lose the flavoring compounds contained in them, which, during normal cooking, go into the water. I wrote more about steaming here.
Su-vid
The products are packed in a plastic bag, immersed in water, the temperature of which is controlled with an accuracy of fractions of a degree, and cooked in this way for several hours, or even days. As a result, the dish gets uniform roasting throughout its entire thickness, retains its taste and remains incredibly juicy. Of course, the sous-vide method cannot be described in a nutshell, so for details I recommend referring to my article Sous-vide Technology: A Complete Guide.
Low temperature baking
Since I did not write a separate article about low-temperature baking, unlike other methods of low-temperature heat treatment, we will dwell on it in a little more detail. Low-temperature baking is the same baking in the oven as we know it, but at a significantly low temperature, in the same range of 50-100 degrees.
It may seem like this method was recently invented, when chefs began to deviate from decades-old recipes and not be afraid to experiment, but in reality, low-temperature baking has a long tradition. In the old days, when all food was cooked in one oven, it was well melted. and then, as they cooled down, they were used to prepare various dishes.
At first, under the hot arches, they baked something that required a high temperature, but cooked quickly enough – bread, flat cakes, and so on. Then came the turn of soups and dishes, which were cooked at a slightly lower temperature, but still quite high.
And at the very end, when the oven was no longer so hot, tough pieces of meat were sent into it, which languished for many hours at a low temperature, softening and gaining taste.Today, low-temperature baking is used for approximately the same purposes: slow baking at a low temperature helps to soften hard cuts, the transformation of connective tissue into gelatin, and a low temperature helps such meat retain more juices, because it is not rich in them anyway. Nevertheless, low-temperature baking has its drawbacks – so, the meat still dries out, because moisture evaporation is so or otherwise it happens naturally.
In order to slow down this process, the meat can be put in a mold with a little water added (or not added, depending on how juicy the meat we are cooking is) and covered with foil. Another disadvantage is that the meat cooked in this way is completely devoid of a crust. For this reason, it is usually brought at a higher temperature or fried – either at the very beginning or at the end, before serving. However, for those for whom fried is contraindicated, this drawback may well become an advantage, giving the opportunity to taste delicious meat baked in the oven.
Low Temperature Bake Recipes
Basically, you can bake any piece of meat this way – just lower the temperature and increase the cooking time. Vegetables and fish can also be baked at low temperatures, but this does not make sense, they will not really benefit from this approach. To give you an idea of the method, here are some ready-made recipes. Some of them use temperatures slightly higher than 100 degrees, so from a formal point of view, this is not a low-temperature bake, but something in between, but they can also be cooked using this method.
- Slow roasted lamb
- Oven beef
- Duck legs in the oven
- Porquet
- Baked Goose Legs