Dealing with inaccurate oven
My wife and I have long been suspicious of our oven temperatures. We have recently gotten heavily into baking, which is more finicky about temperatures than most other cooking. So I decided to check the accuracy of our oven (as Capital Culinarian) using a digital thermocouple thermometer. Setting the oven to 340, I can see that the oven heats up to 340 and then enters a cycle in which it will turn off the heating element when it hits 340, and not turn it on again until it gets to 305. So it’s cycling between what you set and 35 degrees below that, meaning that the average temperature is 17 degrees below what is set.
This leaves us wondering if we should add 17 degrees to the oven temp from recipes. That would get the average temperature to be what the recipe temp is. On the other hand, I believe most (all?) ovens works similarly to this, so maybe the recipe was developed using an oven that does the same thing – in which case we should just continue to set the oven to the recipe temp.
This might seem like I’m overanalyzing the issue, but our experience is that things seem to be a bit undercooked when we follow recipes, and we often leave things in for longer than the recipe states.
What do other people do? Should we try using convection mode?