Whether you ’re get to mouthwatering blueberry muffins from scratch or finally giving in to that partially opened loge of Pisces the Fishes sticks that ’s been hiding in the back of your freezer for eight months , there ’s a fairly good probability that you ’ll be heating your oven to 350ºF. How can such vastly differentfoodsrequire the same cooking temperature ?
It ’s all thanks to something call theMaillard Reaction . In 1912 , chemistLouis Camille Maillardwas the first to describe the magical shift that bechance to food when it ’s cooked at around 300 ° atomic number 9 to 350ºF. The finer particular of the process are still not totally understood , but it ’s generally agreed that the Maillard Reaction happens when hotness transforms the proteins and sugars in food , creating a release of new spirit , aromas , and colors . On an evolutionary level , these delicious changes sign to humans that the food wo n’t harm us and may also contain vital food .
However , that does n’t intend that we should cookeverythingat 350ºF. That ’s just the baseline . For case , most sugar necessitate mellow temperature to rise up quickly , and puff pastries do better in the 400ºF range because the steam released at that temperature help the dough expand . When cooking aThanksgivingturkey , therecipemay call for first roasting at a high temperature to acquire a crispy texture , then depress the heat to 325 ° or 350 ° to full falsify the meat . But for many recipes , 350ºF is the golden regulation .
You should give thanks your lucky asterisk for modern oven temperature dials and meat thermometers , which are way just for gauging the oven ’s temp than the onetime method of just sticking your arm inside it . Before temperature technology existed , Slate publish , bread maker would hold an arm inside the oven to see if they could put up it for more than 30 second . If they could , it was n’t blistering enough yet .
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A translation of this story was published in 2017 ; it has been updated for 2024 .
