You already have a slow cooker in your house — your oven!

[Mike Nolan]

Interesting article in the Voraciously section of the Washington Post on using your oven for slow cooking. Mine will go down to 140 degrees on the dial. I've tested it with an infrared gun and its pretty close to that.

Of course if you want really fine grained temperature control, a sous vide immersion circulator is probably the best choice. That's what I used to make some cocoa butter 'silk' to use as a seed for tempering chocolate.

Hopefully this link will work, I'm not sure what their paywall policy is:

See Oven as Slow Cooker

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[skeptic7]

I often use the slow cooker when I don't want to heat up the kitchen. Also a decade or so ago, an oven was left on for a day and caused a house fire. This was in New York City, the owners were Jewish and didn't want to work on the Sabbath which included turning the oven on. However using an oven which was already on didn't count.
I have seen recipes by Cook's Illustrated which cook a stew in a Dutch oven in an oven set at about 300 degrees.

[RiversideLen]

That's interesting about an oven causing a house fire. I wonder if it malfunctioned. A lot of newer ovens have a kosher setting or a delay start to solve the issue. There is a well known camera store in NY that even closes down its online order taking during the Sabbath.

[Mike Nolan]

When I was in college, I knew someone who had a job working for the Jewish Center on campus. Part of his job was to turn lights and other devices on and off during the Sabbath and other holidays.
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Apparently it is OK to hire someone to do that, just not do it yourself.

[BakerAunt]

Back when I was making pot roast, I used a Dutch Oven, and it cooked for a long time at a low setting, so yes, that would be using the oven as a slow cooker. That is also the idea behind the pork roast recipe that I wrote about in the cooking thread. I'm now wondering if the pork roast recipe assumes an oven with a visible element, and that is why the author had no trouble getting the roast to cook, but the rest of us cannot.

I recall when my Thermador oven (left behind in Texas) developed a stuck relay while I was baking a chocolate cake. Fortunately, I was right there in the kitchen, saw the fire start, and turned off the oven.

A year or so ago, there was an oven fire in the South Bend/Mishawaka area that occurred when the husband set the oven to self-clean, then went out to run an errand. Fortunately, a neighbor saw the smoke and called in the alarm. The house was damaged but repairable.

• This reply was modified 4 years, 2 months ago by BakerAunt.

[Mike Nolan]

My wife thinks we've used the self-clean feature on our oven once in 23 years, I'm not sure we've used it at all, because you have to take some brackets off to use it and I'm pretty sure I've never taken them off.

The appliance repair group we use recommends against using self-cleaning features, especially on newer digital ovens, as that's prone to overheat the electronics.

I've made some dishes that require having the oven on for as long as 12 hours, but I generally won't leave the house if the oven is on, except maybe to run a quick errand.

I'm more likely to leave a burner on low overnight, I sometimes do that when making beef stock. But I usually get up once or twice during the night to see if I need to add water.

[aaronatthedoublef]

Yes, Mike, it is a common practice and considered legal to hire someone to turn things on and off, push elevator buttons, etc. during the Sabbath. I've always disagreed with practice of having someone break the law for me, but I also do not "keep the Sabbath". In big hotels in Israel they have Sabbath and non-Sabbath elevators. The Sabbath elevators stop on each floor going up and each floor going down so no one needs to push a button to call the elevator or designate where they want it to take them.

I do not think my wife would allow me to keep the oven on overnight unless I were staying up to watch it. And even then she might not because she knows I would fall asleep.

And since you've taught us the Maillard reaction is non-pyrolytic it shouldn't inhibit browning.

We won't get a slow cooker because it takes up too much counter space. What would be neat is a combination microwave/toaster oven that was big enough to hold a dutch oven. Then I could use that without turning on the entire oven and heating up the kitchen in the summer.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not convinced that well-insulated big ovens heat up the kitchen that much more than the usually poorly-insulated countertop cookers.

A toaster oven is functionally so different from a microwave that I don't see that as a viable combination. There are microwaves that function as convection ovens or slow cookers, though.

The Maillard reaction may be non-pyrolitic, but it does happen faster at higher temperatures. (Compared to balsamic vinegar, years faster!) And at the usual temperature for baking bread you will get a combination of the Maillard reaction and caramelization.

Don't you wonder who it was who first thought: Let's let this vinegar sit around for a decade and see what happens?

[BakerAunt]

My oven does hold in the heat well when I'm using it, but it seems to be designed to vent the heat when I turn it off if the temperature is over 325 or higher. The fan comes on until the oven is cooled down, probably to around 300F, since when I've baked at that temperature, there is no fan action when I turn it off, and there was for a short while at 325F. So, it would probably not heat up the house too much in the summer.

My husband did mutter about the venting of the heat when I was baking this summer, but in a mostly open concept first floor, it does not stay in the kitchen.

[aaronatthedoublef]

I've used oven/microwave oven combo units before in some long term hotels but they seem to have fallen out of favor for regular microwaves these days. It worked okay. It had some kind of rack in it that worked wit the microwave.

A local appliance store used to sell them but I could never convince my wife we should replace the microwave with it.

Our current range is better than the last which had no insulation but it still throws off a lot of heat and stays hot for a while. More than once I've doublechecked to see if the I've left the oven on after pizza night where it runs at about 500 for a couple hours.

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