Oven problem

watna

Hi all,

We're renting and the oven we have is awful. It likes quite fancy and new and when we moved in I was excited about cooking on it. Unfortunately, it's really not the best oven by any means.

It's a gas oven and the heat comes from one small strip of gas flames at the bottom of the oven. Basically, it burns the bottom of foods - especially baking i.e .cakes and brownies etc. whilst often leaving the top undercooked.

A friend of ours has the same oven in the flat that she is renting and has exaclty the same problem. I guess they must have been going cheap at some stage and landlords snapped them up!

Has anyone any suggestions as to what to do? The oven just does not cook things properly (e.g. casseroles get burned at the bottom whilst the sauce part doesn't thicken due to not getting hot enough and the bottoms of my cakes/biscuits are always burned) Should I cook on a very low heat but for a long time (when I roast chickens it takes about 2 hours longer than it should nayway)

oh for a proper fan assisted oven!

Seaneh

Get an oven thermometer and put it in the top part of the oven, use that and now the inbuilt thermo as a guide, then try and cook foods as near to the top as you can.

And yeah, try slow roasting meats, but a cheap slow cooker for casserols, as for baking, i think just try use the top half of the oven and use an oven thermo.

denat

watna wrote: »

It's a gas oven and the heat comes from one small strip of gas flames at the bottom of the oven. Basically, it burns the bottom of foods - especially baking i.e .cakes and brownies etc. whilst often leaving the top undercooked.

AFAIK, this is how most gas ovens are designed ie a strip of gas jets at the bottom rear.

Are you by any chance placing your casserole / baking tray OVER that strip of flame? If so, you shouldn't. The idea is that the heat generated by the jets rises and circulates around the oven. Your cooking material should be kept roughly half way between front and rear of oven and definitely not even slightly obstructing the heat rising from the jets.

rubadub

Could you put an extra empty baking tray down the bottom to sort of buffer the effect of it, like how you might put towels on a radiator to even out the heat if trying to warm something up. Perhaps it could be fixed at an angle over the flames.

Stick the cooker name in google, somebody might have a good idea.

The Sweeper

I had to deal with a gas oven last year and found it very much a trial and error exercise. First, as another poster has advised, buy an oven thermometer.

You should have at least two shelves in your gas oven. You need to get your food as close to the absolute centre of the oven as you can, and never lay anything directly on the base of the oven, it should always be on wire racks. Roasts and cooking from frozen do best dead centre. Cakes and biscuits perform better on a higher rack. Bread should occupy the top half of the oven.

Another trick is to overheat the oven and then let it cook back down - start all roast meats at the highest temperature available on the oven. Most roast meats will benefit from an initial 20 minute 'sizzle', followed by turning down the temperature and slow roasting. I used this method with chickens and it worked a charm.

It took the gas oven I was using some 35 minutes to heat up properly to be able to handle a Sunday roast dinner. It was a range oven, so it was enormous and that must have contributed.

Once I'd cracked the secrets, I found the oven quite enjoyable to use, and felt I got a very specific kind of slow roasted chicken recipe from it.