If you bake a cake, what's the difference between baking it directly without preheating in the oven and baking it after preheating?

When baking a cake, whether the oven is preheated before baking will definitely make a difference.

Based on the requirement of precise process control, each recipe has clear instructions (standards) on the temperature and time of cake baking, and it is also a clear requirement (emphasis) to preheat (empty bake) the oven to the specified temperature before baking.

Significance of preheating: to provide stable baking environment temperature (including the temperature of upper and lower baking tubes and the temperature of air in the furnace), so that cakes can be cooked stably and with quality during baking. Ensure that the quality of finished products reaches the standard.

If the oven is not preheated and baked directly, it will go through such a process:

1. It takes 5-6 minutes to reach the preset temperature when baking starts: the upper and lower heating pipes of the oven have reached or exceeded the set temperature (too high), but the air temperature in the oven is slowly heating up until it reaches the set temperature (too low). At this time, the temperature probe in the oven (the temperature in the oven is too low) can't cut off the energy. The temperature of the mold at the bottom of the cake is too high, and the top crust continues to be heated by radiation, but the thermal convection is insufficient to heat the cake paste inside the cake crust.

It can be seen that in this process, the cake crust (including the whole crust, including the upper and lower surroundings) is subjected to continuous high temperature, and the water loss time is 5-6 minutes longer than that of normal preheating baking.

2. 10-30 minutes later (the time required for different cake volumes is different): at this time, the temperature in the furnace reaches the standard, and it enters the continuous and stable baking stage. According to the size of the cake and the process of recipe, the actual performance is different.

Like heavy oil cakes, because the skin has hardened (heavy oil cakes are usually crossed with oil before baking to ensure that the skin is open when baking), cake paste often gushes out and expands violently when heated, causing the cake skin to burst.

Like Qifeng cake, because its protein paste has poor gas holding capacity, it loses more gas than normal baking, and its volume expansion is not obvious.

Like a complete egg sponge cake, it will look normal. But the volume is actually weaker than that of normal preheating and baking.

3. In the last 5-6 minutes of baking, no matter what kind of cake, if there is no deliberate intervention, then the skin must be deeply colored, and there is a heavy or light paste phenomenon at the bottom (the bigger the volume, the more obvious). What needs to be emphasized here is that it is meaningless to judge whether the cake is mature by the color depth of the cake skin at this time.

Other qualities are uncertain and have different consequences. Either the shape of the cake paste is damaged, or the volume is too small, or it collapses, or there is no obvious problem mentioned above, which seems to be normal quality.

(PS: Take a small household oven as an example. Commercial ovens take a long time to warm up because they are too big. In addition, professionals use commercial ovens, so it is really embarrassing to bake cakes without preheating. )

As can be seen from the above, baking the cake directly in the oven without preheating, compared with the cake processed by normal technology (with preheating), the skin loses too much water and the overall quality is uncertain. Conclusion: Without preheating the oven to bake cakes, that is, the baking temperature is unstable, the quality of baked products will be uncontrollable.