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Comment by 41b696ef1113 | Hacker News Reader

I too think that sounds shockingly fast, but maybe I should re-visit my approach for oven temp. I throw steaks into a regular oven at 200F and I might wait 70+ minutes for a ribeye to hit 120F.

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Seventy minutes?! Turn your oven up. Wow.

How thick are your steaks and what temperature do they start at? My steaks take almost two hours following the Kenji method D:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ez9pz35wrn7j1o/steak.png?dl=0

Assume a Whole Foods ribeye as the reference steak here. They should not take anything close to 2 hours (you'll note that Kenji's guide agrees). Turn your oven up!

I will give it a shot! Always excited to up my steak game.

If you have a toaster oven, I strongly recommend the toaster oven. They come up to temp fast, and they have a much tighter band of temperatures than an oven, which is always +15/-15 from your set temperature. Holding a tight, low temperature is all you're asking from the oven, and toaster ovens are built to do that (ironically, they fucking blow at making toast).

What are the reasons traditional ovens have such a wide band here? It seems like with modern technology one ought to be able to cut that down a bit. Is it just physically infeasible based on the size of the space to be heated? Or is it tremendous cost pressure for consumer goods? Or something else?

A variety of things. More space is definitely harder to heat evenly, especially without airflow coming from something like a convection oven, or keeping relative humidity very high, such as in a combi/steam oven, but a lot of it is cost pressure. If you go far enough up market to Miele, Wolf, etc., you can find ovens that will keep a much more consistent temperature.

Does the steak actually come out worse if it takes that long or is it just a question of not wanting to wait?

Have you tried measuring your oven temp? Maybe it runs cold.

Amusingly, having not tested it, prior experience would indicate that my oven runs hot. Will throw a probe in there the next time I bake something.

All this being said, other than requiring a bit of extra planning, I have been quite pleased with the results of this slow cook. Maybe try a small temperature increment the next time I do it.

I'm going to try this one night when I'm on my last 2 beers. Might just time out perfect!

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