When you cook from scratch, you are already saving money. But did you know that the way you cook can affect your budget? Learn how to reduce your cooking expenses when you use your oven with the following tips.
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, Energy Hogs: Where Does Most of Your Electricity Go?, the oven demands a lot of your energy dollars when it is in use to cook your food. There are ways to reduce this energy usage.
Smart Preheating
Do you always need to preheat your oven? Warming up a pizza or food that is already cooked seldom needs a hot from the start oven. You food will warm up just fine in the same amount of time without preheating.
If you do need to preheat the oven, make sure that the timing is right. There is nothing worse for wasting energy with your oven than to have it sit there for 20 minutes before you are ready to add your meal. With very few exceptions, you can prepare you meal in advance and then turn your oven on to preheat. This way, as soon as the oven reached temperature, you can pop in your food.
Bulk Bake
Try to time your meals and your baking to happen in sequence. That is, do what the folks of old did with their brick ovens. Heat it up and then baked and cook as many meals as you can in a row. This will reduce your oven energy usage because you are taking advantage of the fact that your oven is already heated. Most of the energy the oven grabs is when it needs to heat up to temperature from a cold or room temperature condition.
If you bake and cook in bulk, you can freeze any extra meals and portions, heating them up in the microwave later, if necessary.
Look for tomorrow’s article about turning off your oven and finding more frugal ways to cook and bake.
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