The one I loved was how they worked out the temperature in the days of a brick oven that you heated by filling it full of firewood and burning the wood until the entire space filled up...
You'd rake out all the coals, then test how hot it was by sticking your arm in and seeing how long you could leave it. Less than a second - VERY HOT.
Then, because setting all that up was a total pain, you'd have your dough ready to go in. Throw it in, let it cook, and mix up your fast-cooking cake (sponge, etc). Time to pull the bread out, have the sponge mix ready to go in, check the temp (Hmmm. Three seconds. Hot but not too much), then put in the cake.
Then mix up your medium-level stuff - heavier cakes, possibly the fruit tart in the pastry shell you made earlier with the bread. While that's cooking, mix up the biscuits/cookies that will have the slow bake.
In winter, the danger was the oven would cool too quickly, despite the double layer of bricks and the sand insulation. In summer, the danger was that you would cook, dropping like a fly in a stinking hot kitchen while you tried to get everything ready at once...
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Re: In the spirit of being useful, have a chart (from an answer I once gave at Seasoned Advice)
Date: 2016-05-19 02:02 pm (UTC)You'd rake out all the coals, then test how hot it was by sticking your arm in and seeing how long you could leave it. Less than a second - VERY HOT.
Then, because setting all that up was a total pain, you'd have your dough ready to go in. Throw it in, let it cook, and mix up your fast-cooking cake (sponge, etc). Time to pull the bread out, have the sponge mix ready to go in, check the temp (Hmmm. Three seconds. Hot but not too much), then put in the cake.
Then mix up your medium-level stuff - heavier cakes, possibly the fruit tart in the pastry shell you made earlier with the bread. While that's cooking, mix up the biscuits/cookies that will have the slow bake.
In winter, the danger was the oven would cool too quickly, despite the double layer of bricks and the sand insulation. In summer, the danger was that you would cook, dropping like a fly in a stinking hot kitchen while you tried to get everything ready at once...