TIL my oven thermometer was 50 degrees off for 3 months

I kept burning cookies and blamed the recipe every time. Turned out the cheap oven thermometer I hung on the rack was reading 375 when the oven was really at 425. I only found out when I borrowed my neighbor's digital probe from Oak Park. Why does everyone trust those hanging dials without testing them first?

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1 Comment

grantp2816d ago

Hold on, I gotta push back on this! Those hanging dial thermometers are just fine for most people, and the whole point is they give you a general idea. If you're baking cookies and they come out slightly overdone, that's on you for not checking them earlier. Ovens have hot spots and they cycle on and off, so a 50 degree difference is honestly within the normal range of what you'd get with a fancy probe too. You can't just hang a thermometer on the rack and expect it to read the exact air temp right where the cookies sit, that's not how ovens work. The real issue is you never tested your oven with a separate thermometer when you first got it, and now you're blaming the tool instead of the process. And honestly, that neighbor's probe probably isn't even calibrated either, so who's to say that reading is the "truth" anyway?