(no subject)

[coraa]

Hm.

Several of my recipes (an Alton Brown steak recipe, the New York Times no-knead bread recipe, a recipe for making good pizza crust at home, a few others) have, as the first step, preheating a cast-iron pan in an oven on highest heat for a good while: 5-20 minutes, depending on recipe. This is a method I've used before, and it's served me well: the preheat heats both the heavy iron and the walls of the oven, so that when you put the cool meat/dough/whatever into the oven to cook, the oven loses little temperature to cold-shock and the food can therefore actually cook at 500F (or whatever), rather than dropping to 400 or lower and having to climb back up.

However. The new oven is, um, fairly powerful, and the new smoke detector is fairly sensitive. So every time I've tried to do this, the pan has started to smoke slightly (because of the oil left on it by the seasoning process), and the smoke alarm has squealed at me, often at length. Even if I've opened the windows and turned on the exhaust fan. This problem doesn't happen when I'm cooking food in the pan in the oven, even over high heat, I presume because the food never gets as blazingly hot as the empty pan.

I suspect that, if I figure out the timing just right, I can get my empty pan hellishly hot enough to work with the recipes, without setting off the alarm. But it keeps being extremely startling. And I wonder if the neighbors think we're trying to burn the house down.

(As triath points out: at least now I know the alarm works!)

Comments

[porfinn.livejournal.com]

Yeah...you could ask your landlord if you could move the smoke detector. Oh! Wait! You don't have to ask-- in fact, you could just take out the batteries and chuck the stupid thing (my guess is you will probably want to get different/better ones anyway).