Baking at home with one small oven

People sometimes apologise to us for their oven. There is no need. The deck oven here holds heat better and that is most of the advantage. Everything else is a habit you can copy.

Your oven is lying to you

Buy an oven thermometer. They cost very little and almost every domestic oven we have ever tested runs ten to twenty degrees off, usually cool. If your bakes are consistently pale and slow, that is likely the whole explanation, and no recipe will fix it.

Set the dial to whatever number gets the thermometer to the temperature you actually want, and write that number down somewhere. It will be the same number every time.

Preheat for longer than you think

The oven beeps when the air is hot, not when the oven is. The metal, the shelves and the walls all still need to come up, and they are what actually cooks the bottom of a bun. Give it a further fifteen or twenty minutes after the beep. If you bake on a stone or a heavy tray, half an hour.

One tray at a time, middle shelf

A small oven has hot corners and cool corners and no amount of fan fixes it entirely. Bake one tray, in the middle, and turn it around at the halfway point. Two trays at once means two mediocre trays.

Steam for the first ten minutes

Bread rises in the oven only while its crust is still soft, and steam keeps it soft. Put an old metal roasting tin on the floor of the oven while it preheats, and pour a cup of just boiled water into it as the bread goes in. Shut the door quickly and do not open it again for ten minutes.

Use a tin you do not care about. It will discolour and warp and that is the job.

Bake smaller, and use the heat twice

Six buns bake more evenly in a small oven than twelve do. And once you have paid to heat the thing, put something else in after: a tray of nuts, tomorrow morning's granola, a second small loaf. We do the same here, in a much larger and more expensive way.