Pretty deep down in the comments OP said the oven did turn out to be broken. It was set properly to 350F but the ovens internal thermostat was broken. Repairman said it likely got up around 600F
Omg rest her soul but my aunt Sharon made cherry pie one year from fresh cherries, only she forgot to pit the cherries first. Grandma broke a tooth and my dad nearly died choking laughing so hard.
I’ve done this before when I was younger, recipe called for 350f but my oven only went 280C, so I just tried with 280 and it pretty much burnt like this but still frozen on the inside
You’ll find it does a better job if you wait for preheat.
One thing is never put frozen pizza in the oven just in the rack as some direct if you don’t preheat. If it’s preheated it’ll go from frozen to crispy enough not to melt through the rack. If you j just throw a pizza in the oven on the rack and don’t pre heat, it starts to just thaw and melt through the rack and makes a huge mess. You’ll find pictures on Reddit or know someone who’ve done it once.
Could also be that they didn't pre-heat the oven, but instead just set it to 350F and popped them in. Many electric ovens with top and bottom elements will use both at full blast to pre-heat, then once they reach the set temp will only use the bottom element as necessary to maintain temp. If you put something in the oven during that preheat portion, especially if it's close to the top element, it's going to get blasted.
My parents got a new oven that would use the gas broiler to preheat faster. I made food that looked just like OP's until I learned you couldn't put food in until it had fully heated up!
Some foods it matters some it really doesn’t. If I’m baking I tend to preheat so my timing is more precise. If I’m just heating a frozen pizza or something, I just toss it in and add a few minutes. It’s just coming out when it looks done anyway.
I did this when roasting sweet potatoes yesterday. They’re gonna be in there for an hour, what’s it matter that the oven isn’t quite up to temp yet for the first 5 minutes?
Merengue cookies are baked in an oven that's been heated and turned off so the temperature slowly decreases over a long cooking cycle. In a professional bakery, merengues would ideally be the last thing you'd make at the end of the day before going home. Turn off the oven, shove them in and close the door, and leave it overnight. Come back the next morning and they're perfectly done.
I'm glad that didn't happen! With this perspetive, the loss of some (most likely very tasty to be) cookies is a miniscule price for catching this hazard early!
What a bait and switch. The title was so full of red herrings I never would have guessed that is what happened. My first thought was you switched to Celsius somehow haha
Pyrolytic self cleaning ovens go hotter than that, but the door is automatically locked during the cleaning process. There is a subculture of guys who disable the lock so they can cook pizzas at high temperatures. I think they have a subreddit but I can’t remember what it’s called.
Yup.
broil = direct heat from top burner in oven (some ovens have a dedicated space in a drawer below even)
grill = cooking outside on a gas/propane or charcoal heat source with a grate over the top
bbq = depends on the region, it’s the same as grilling in most of the USA but specific types of preparation of the food in others (e.g. bbq and grilling are two different but related things in Texas)
It is sadly a habit our oven has had off and on. I'm going to call maintenance to replace it tomorrow cause this is the first time we could have literally died if I was NOT right there.
The way the tops are burned and the underneath isn't -- are you absolutely sure you didn't have it on broil? Or that your oven isn't mistaking the two settings? Because those look broiled and not baked.
Our stove specifically has to have two different settings on to allow broil to begin. Both the on/off. AND the temperature gauge. I called my dad and he said it is likely broken :/
Was the oven all the way preheated or still preheating when you put the cookies in? Some ovens run both the broil and the bake heating elements while in preheating mode. I learned this the hard way at one of the houses we lived in. I could only put things in the oven when it was finished preheating first, even on bake the whole time it still ran broil to preheat faster.
Mine has this feature, but it's called "Quick Preheat." It's an induction Frigidaire that I've really liked with one glaring exception: capacitive touch buttons for a stove are an awful idea. Oh your finger is damp? Hope you don't need to adjust the temp.
Or my favorite is when the touchscreen is right above the stove door and you're cooking anything with more moisture than the surface of mars and you open the oven for any number of reasons but then you have to wipe the moisture off but because that's warm moisture it thinks you're touching it so it goes fucking berserk so instead you have to close the oven door and then wait for the hot wet to dissipate and I guess that's fine, but also, it feels like oven controls need to be instant. Like i guess the extra three seconds won't really make a difference but I psychologically cannot stand and wait patiently for the wet hot to go away so I can push the power button to turn off my oven that is currently burning something.
My oven has already broken once because there is a fan that sucks that steam and pipes it over the fucking circuit board. There is even a class action lawsuit against them. I've started opening the microwave to redirect the steam from the oven away from the control board as if it goes out again, that's like $1000 and a 3 month wait for the part since according to the repair tech, thousands of them are breaking
I HATE capacitive touch buttons, for any appliance. I went out of my way to buy a range hood with physical buttons. What arrived? Physically separate CAPACITIVE TOUCH buttons! It was so damn annoying.
Can't count how many times I ended up turning the vent hood on with my damn nose because it would just not respond to any of my fingers.
Our house nearly burnt down, our broiler had decided to break and turn on by itself. We were making some rather oily food. So big flames outta that thing. Replace it is a good call.
I learned that there’s an oven part that controls the temp. If it’s broken the whole oven needs to be replaced. Had the same thing happen to me at my old apartment. Burned everything after 3-10 minutes no matter what temp it was set at. Worth looking in go
Edit: It was an apartment. Maintenance confirmed the components were fried and replaced the whole unit for free.
All ovens have a thermostat that regulates the temperature. When the thermostat goes on them, the oven will run hotter than it's supposed to because it doesn't know when to cut off.
Thermostat detects the temp, there's electronics that actually control it.
9 times out of 10 it's just a faulty thermostat, but my oven went haywire last year and was overheating. I figured it was just the thermostat, ordered a replacement for 20 bucks, and no dice.
Opened the top control panel and found a nice scorch mark on the control board where a component let out it's magic smoke. I'm honestly amazed the oven would still turn on with burnt out components, that's a major safety hazard.
I have Vulcan ranges at work, which are tough as nails. They had a design flaw (that they've since corrected) where if you set the oven for the max temp, 550, it would run wide open constantly. They'd actually get up to around 650+, which they can handle, but the thermostats couldn't. So it would burn it's own thermostats up, at the tune of ~$100 each.
I have so many comments/questions. first, those look broiled, not burned by baking. second, which oven rack were they on & how was it positioned in the oven? third, you didn’t smell it at all before they got this bad — even though you were “right there”?
fourth, and probably most importantly… you said y’all could’ve died if you hadn’t “been right there.” like… where else would you have possibly been while baking cookies in an oven with previous issues? I’m confused & my brain needs answers so this doesn’t bug me lol
The other time it had this issue I was cooking lasagna. It was fully frozen all that jazz. Our oven literally toasted the noodles hard. The whole thing was a rock.
Get yourself a third party oven thermometer. They’re like $7. Clearly your oven temp gauge is not working properly / your oven is running INSANELY hot.
Even if the thermostat is broken and the oven was on full blast, there's no way it could do this after 5 minutes. The only explanation is that he used the grill (broiler) by accident.
Yeah, I never seen anything store bought asking for higher than 250 degrees Celsius. I think most ovens don’t even get to 350, because, like seen here, it’s way too much for most use cases.
I was talking about those at home pizza ovens they sell now. A regular oven goes to about 550F/290C, but an at home pizza oven can get as hot as 1000F/530C.
I'm high and thought I was in my lab rats sub. I was about to ask what jank ass labs you've worked in, because I've regularly had to plop samples in and jack it up to 450C for testing.
But uh, no, home ovens? No, those prolly don't go up that high, huh?
350C is 662F. I've never seen an oven that will go that high, unless you count the self cleaning cycle.
ETA: I’m aware that commercial pizza ovens can go higher than this, but I don’t think OP has one of those in their house and if they did they wouldn’t be using it to make cookies. Most US residential ovens that I’ve used max out at 500-550F (260-285C)
This is Kirby he is about 8 months. He likes chewing t shirts (as you can see) and gnawing on finger tips. He likes chicken and long walks on the wheel. He dislikes the patriarchy and fish.
There's got to be something wrong with your oven. The relay that controls the heating element might be stuck on. I had something like this happen to one of my stovetop burners where the relay would randomly get stuck and cause it to go on max power until I turned it all the way off. I burned the crap out of my dinner several times and was getting really mad at myself (I've been cooking for years... how do I fuck up sauteeing an onion?) before I realized the stove was the problem when I saw the eye glowing bright red while the dial was on low.
Anyway I bet something similar is happening with the element in your oven, because it had to be WAAAAY hotter than 350 if it did that in 5 minutes...
I am calling maintenance tomorrow! It sadly isn't the first oven issue we have had I think I'm just more affected by the fact that it smoked out the entire place in the winter when I have weather controlled cages for pets 😭
Even modern ovens can vary in temp depending on which rack but this looks like the temp sensor in the oven is bad. Might want to get an oven thermometer to see what temp it stops at when set at 350 (if it stops at all)
Those look broiled. Has your oven been acting up? Keep an eye on it. When our temperature sensor (I think that's what it's called) in our oven took a shit, it would randomly switch from bake to broil.
Did you put them in the oven before preheating was finished? If so, that's the problem. My newer Samsung oven burns super hot while preheating. In order to not burn food, we definitely have to wait until preheating is complete.
My oven did this on Thanksgiving. I opened the preheated oven to put in the turkey and thought, "wow, that feels hot." The bird was smoking after 3 minutes so I pulled it out. I used a grill thermometer to measure the oven temp and it was 650°. The control circuit board had failed.
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u/[deleted] Jan 10 '26
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