I was watching some cooking show this morning lying in bed, and they cooked these small appetizers in an oven at 450 degrees for 30 minutes. I go, “Man, that’s gonna get the crap cooked out of it.”
You might say, how would you know that? How do you know how long to cook something in the oven without a recipe? I’ve been asked this question a million times. (Well, not a million.)
To figure out cooking temperatures without a recipe is a learned skill. But it’s not hard, just use a little common sense.
Estimating a cooking temperature (and time) depends on how dense the item is, what you are trying to cook, and how you want the outside to look like.
Are you cooking a turkey? Slow cooking a corned beef? Making tuna casserole? Pigs-in-a-blanket?
325 – 350 Low and slow – Braising and Roasting.
350 – 375 Casseroles and most baking.
400 – 425 Sheet pan roasting & appetizers.
475 – Don’t go too far because you might burn it.
Broil – At your own risk!
How do know how long to cook it? Easy… cook it until it’s done.
Let’s start out with a casserole. Lasagna is going to be an excellent example because it’s very dense. It needs to cook a little longer than most casseroles. If we cook it at a high temperature, what’s going to happen is around the edges it’s going to bubble and then it’s going to burn. But it is still won’t be done in the middle. We need to cook it all the way through. Cook it a 350 degrees, probably for an hour. My Mom gave me this rule of thumb. The rule of thumb is, if it bubbles in the middle, it’s done. That’s really true with fruit pies also. You know how you do the little slit in the middle you cut to let steam out? If you wait until you see that little bubble of pie filling through that little slit in the top it will be set up.
We cook things that need to cook that are dense at a lower temperature – longer. We’ll generally cook it at 350 degrees. If we’re cooking a Chicken or Turkey, we would cook it at 325, unless we were doing some fancy chicken oven blaster thing. I don’t know anything I’ve ever cooked lower than 325 degrees. That is the reason why the new ovens generally default to 350, it is because that is the most common temperature. You can’t lose at 350.
Correction, at 350 degrees you may lose with cooking frozen appetizers. You look at them and you see that the directions call for 450 for 15 minutes. That’s quick but they’re little. You want to get a little crispy crust on them, get it brown. 350 will make them soggy.
375 degrees is if you want to get a little bit of a crust or some caramelization, or try to push the cooking time up on a thinner casserole. 400 degrees is when you’re roasting something like potatoes that you’ve cut up and then put it on a sheet pan. That is considered roasting. The oven needs to be hotter because we want a crispy crust on it. We would do it at 400 – 425, depending on how dense or large the potatoes are.
Again, If it’s going to be something that needs to be in the oven a while, lower. If it needs to be fast, if it’s a thin item, a thin piece of fish, or some boneless chicken breasts, higher and faster.
I have this great recipe for mashed potatoes and you make them the day before, put the them in a casserole dish and it becomes very dense. Those potatoes are going to take an hour re-heat. It would need to be in there for a minimum of an hour at 350 degrees because it’s a big cold mashed potato rock. (But entirely worth it to eat!)
If you don’t know, then try it the first time, but I want to always encourage you to get to know your food and get a feel for it.
Good luck, keep trying, you’ll get the hang of it!