What happens at 180 degrees?

corblimey

I was browsing through my various recipes this evening (culling the unused ones, tbh) and notice that the vast majority of oven based recipes require a oven preheated to 180 degrees celsius. No matter what sort of meat it is (and let's be honest, it's nearly always meat), the magic of cooking appears to occur only at 180 degrees.

I assume you can reduce the heat and it'll take longer or increase the heat (although you risk burning the outside before the inside is cooked that way), but where the heck did 180 come from? Why not an even 200? Or something awkward like 173.5? My oven doesn't even have 180 on it, it has a dial and figures for 160 and 220, so I've been estimating 180 for years anyway and I've not died yet!

kylith

180? I've always found that everything is either 200C or 220C.

Slunk

180-200 is normally where i turn the dial to. Failing that, brown its cooked, black its f. . .d

CJhaughey

I would hazard a guess and say because sugar caramelises at 170degc then at 180 the sugars in whatever is being cooked will be guaranteed to caramelise with a 10 deg margin of error.

vibe666

if you use a meat thermometer you generally find that meat is officially 'cooked' when the core temp of the meat hits around 70 degrees celcius (give or take a few degrees depending on the meat in question and how you want it cooked).

the problem there though, is if you turn your oven to 70 it'll take about a week for the heat to make it all the way to the middle of the meat.

i imagine that someone in history has worked out through trial and error that for x amount of time per pound that 180 degrees is about the right temp for the inside to to get to 70 degrees and outside to be browned without getting burnt to a crisp.

murphym7

My oven is very hot, everything goes in at 150 - which in reality about 180 with my too hot oven.

CJhaughey

You can buy an oven thermometer which accurately measure the temp in your oven, they cost less than 10euro.

vibe666

if you want to accurately test the temp of your oven without a thermometer, stick a spoonful of sugar on a baking sheet and throw it in the middle of the oven at 180 degrees for 60 minutes. at 180 it might turn a little brown, but it shouldn't melt.

assuming all is well, do the same again, but this time do it at 190 degrees. the sugar should melt within about 15 minutes.

depending on the results, you can either use this info to help you as an offset when you're cooking, or check to see if your oven has a manual temp adjustment of some sort.

in case anyone is interested, (although you've probably already guessed) the melting point of sugar/sucrose is 185 degrees celcius.