You started the new year with gusto. You bought all the ingredients to make Salted Caramel Apple Cookies as a sweet treat for your future (Very Busy) self. You carefully beat the butter and sugar. You lovingly grated the apples. But when you pulled the tray out of the oven, one half of the batch was perfectly golden and the other was dry and a smidge burnt. Your heart sank like a soufflรฉ gone wrong. And this is where you learned a valuable lesson the hard way: When baking cakes, pastries, and cookies, itโs usually a good idea to rotate your pans.
If you cook from recipes often, youโve likely stumbled across the instruction to turn your pans 180 degrees about halfway through the bake time. And youโve also likely wondered, โBut do I have to?โ Rotating your pans can feel more like a nitpicky suggestion than a hard and fast rule. After all, shouldnโt our modern ovens be able to hold their temperatures? (Itโs kinda their one jobโฆ) And havenโt grandmas the world over warned us that opening the oven would let all the heat out and collapse our precious cakes? Not to mention, where is the darn oven mitt, anyway?
Itโs only when youโve suffered the loss of a half-burned tray of cookies that you can finally accept the truth: Your oven isnโt perfect, and neither, my friend, are you. Hereโs what you need to know about rotating your pans while baking.
How do I rotate my pans?
This part is easy. If youโve got one pan in the oven, all you need to do is rotate it 180 degrees. If youโve got two pans in the oven, youโll want to rotate the pans 180 degrees and swap both of their locationsโwhether this means theyโre side to side, or on two separate racks. Keep this little switcheroo fast, because the longer youโve got the oven door open, the more heat youโre letting escape and the longer itโll take for your oven to come back up to temperature. Our suggestion: Keep your kitchen timer and your oven mitts in one handy spot on your counter so youโre not last-minute scrambling around to silence the beeper and hunt for a makeshift potholder.
Why do I need to rotate them, anyway?
Even in the best of all possible worlds, one where your oven is perfectly calibrated, itโs very likely that it has a few spots that are hotter than others. In an electric or gas oven, the heat source is usually at the bottom, meaning your lowest rack will get warmer faster. (The inverse if your ovenโs heat source is at the top.) Plus, irregularities in the heat source may make one corner hotter than the other. To avoid one section of your bake drying out or browning too much, youโll want to rotate your pan to make sure each side gets the same amount of love.
Convection ovens can help a little with this problem because they use fans to circulate the hot air more evenly around your baked goods. But even that wonโt save your buns if a large sheet pan is blocking the airflow.
Does what Iโm baking make a difference?
If youโve got an oven with minimal hot spots and good airflow, youโre less likely to end up with an uneven bake. The exception, according to Dorie Greenspan, are cookies and any other treats youโd bake on a large, flat sheet pan. โBaking sheets are big and so air doesnโt circulate around them the way it does with, letโs say, a cake pan, and because of that, Iโll turn them,โ she writes in Baking with Dorie.
A good rule of the thumb: The more space a pan takes up in your oven, the less airflow it allows and the more likely youโll need to rotate it midway through cooking. If youโve got a small oven, one standard-sized sheet pan can be enough to block all airflow around the oven racks.
So, should I be rotating my pans when roasting anything?
Rotating your pans isnโt just a technique for baked goods and dessertsโanything that youโd want to brown evenly could benefit from a quick switch. A recipe for a whole head of cauliflower, for example, where youโd want it to be golden-brown all around, may call for you to rotate your pans.
