It's going to depend on your oven and its setup - baking stone or steel, etc. The goal is to get all parts of the oven to stabilize their temperature. Longer will be better. For my oven with my baking steel, it takes a good hour from turn-on. If you have an infra-red thermometer you can scan different parts of the oven from time to time to see if they are changing temperature or not. If you do this, be prepared to be surprised at the temperature variations between different parts.
This means that when a recipe says to preheat for, say, half an hour, don't go taking that literally. The writer knows that preheating is needed but probably has no idea what's really happening in their oven, let alone yours.
Experiment with your own oven. For baking biscuits (UK: scones) on a baking sheet, 15 minutes works well for me. For hearth breads on a baking steel, 1 hour is the minimum I would use.
It's going to depend on your oven and its setup - baking stone or steel, etc. The goal is to get all parts of the oven to stabilize their temperature. Longer will be better. For my oven with my baking steel, it takes a good hour from turn-on. If you have an infra-red thermometer you can scan different parts of the oven from time to time to see if they are changing temperature or not. If you do this, be prepared to be surprised at the temperature variations between different parts.
This means that when a recipe says to preheat for, say, half an hour, don't go taking that literally. The writer knows that preheating is needed but probably has no idea what's really happening in their oven, let alone yours.
Experiment with your own oven. For baking biscuits (UK: scones) on a baking sheet, 15 minutes works well for me. For hearth breads on a baking steel, 1 hour is the minimum I would use.
TomP
Wow! A whole hour!
Thanks, Tom. That's really helpful. I was thinking my oven was running cool but maybe that's not the case.
I got another dumb question but will open a new thread.
Katie
However long it takes. Enjoy!