eli5: why isn’t it possible to cook e.g. cookies at twice the temperature for half the time? obviously i know it isn’t possible, but *why*? what’s the physics behind it?

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eli5: why isn’t it possible to cook e.g. cookies at twice the temperature for half the time? obviously i know it isn’t possible, but *why*? what’s the physics behind it?

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24 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

Heat conduction. Every material, in this case dough, has a different rate at which it can transport heat, in this case into the inside of your cookie. If you have more incoming heat at the surface than the dough can conduct you get more browning/burning. The correct cooking temperature for pretty much anything is finding a balance between getting it hot enough in the center, while you don’t burn the outside too much.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Heat needs time to spread from the surface to the core of something, if you make the temperature too high the outside will burn before the middle gets to cook

Anonymous 0 Comments

Well, double of 300° degrees isn’t 600° degrees, but 1060° degrees. Thats because absolute zero is -460 degrees. I imagine your cookies would be vaporized in a fraction of a second at 1060 degrees.

Those are Fahrenheit. Celsius equivalents are 150° doubled is really 573°.

Anonymous 0 Comments

This reminds of this Disney movie where these characters were prepping for a cooking show competition and one of the dudes tried to bake the cookies in half the time by increasing the temp and ended up burning them. Don’t remember what it was called though.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Why not? It is called a microwave. I get the jist of the question but it is possible. It is sad that few people actually understand how a microwave works. It is a magical beast that gets around so many evaporation corners in cooking. FYI, that power button on your microwave is a useful thing.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The incredibly simple explanation is the outside is exposed to a higher heat so Cooks quicker but it takes time for heat to reach the centre and due to the extra heat the outside burnt in that time.

Anonymous 0 Comments

The hot air only causes the outside of the food to get hot. The hot air doesn’t touch the inside of the food. The inside of the food only gets hot because heat “leaks” its way through the food from the outside to the inside. This needs to take time to happen. The food is a good insulator, taking time to let heat “leak” its way through.

So if you set the temperature high and try to cook it too fast, the heat hasn’t had time to “leak” all the way to the inside by the time the outside starts to get overdone. Try to do that and you end up with food that’s burned on the outside when it’s still raw in the middle.

If you notice, whether the instructions say to go high temperature for a short time versus lower temperature for a long time often depends on how thick the food is. If you have two different store-bought frozen pizzas from the same company that are mostly the same ingredients except one is the thin-crust version and the other is the thick-crust version, the baking instructions will differ. The thicker pizza will have the slower instructions (lower temperature, longer time). If you try to cook it with the same faster instructions the thin crust version has, you’ll end up with a crust that’s all floppy and made of goo. The heat didn’t have time to “leak” all the way through and cook the the inside of the dough.

(EDIT) Note, this is for conventional ovens and for toaster ovens. They work by making the air hot, and then the hot air touching the food cooks the food. A microwave oven doesn’t do it that way. In fact it barely heats the air at all. A microwave raises the food temperature by using radio waves that make molecules vibrate, making the food cook throughout, inside at the same time as outside. In fact, the inside often cooks a little faster than the outside in a microwave. Even though both the inside and outside get an equal amount of heat input from the waves, the inside can’t “bleed” that heat away to the outside air so its temperature rises faster. The problem on a microwave can end up being the opposite of on a conventional oven. Instead of “outside overdone and inside underdone” it can be “outside underdone and inside overdone”. This is why things like “Hot Pockets” and little microwave pizzas are cooked using a little cardboard table or sheath with a kind of grey coating on it. That coating is just a little bit metallic. The metal “curves” the microwaves toward it so stuff next to the grey coating heats up faster than other stuff in the microwave does. The crust needs to heat a bit more than the inside does, which would naturally happen in a conventional oven but doesn’t in a microwave oven.

Anonymous 0 Comments

If the cookies you made were very thin, it is possible to speed up cook time with increased heat.
Although they would cook quite quickly anyway, so the benefits of the increased heat would be miniscule.

Anonymous 0 Comments

It’s because of the speed at which heat moves through the whole cookie.

If you double the heat outside, you do not double the speed at which the heat moves through the cookie.

Also at certain temperatures you get chemical reactions on the outside that actually slow the speed at which heat moves through the cookie, so the recommended temperature to bake a cookie is often the optimum in regards to many factors.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Chemical compounds have a non-linear response to temperature. Things that are stable for very long periods of time at one temperature will decompose very quickly at higher temperatures. For example, the flash point or smoke point of cooking oils. You can heat the hell out of them, well under that point, for quite a while and not much will happen, but if you go over it they will decompose and give off smoke and maybe even catch fire. If you tried to blast cookies at a really high temperature the dough would just burn to carbon.