Thermostat on my main oven went haywire mid-service tonight

Right in the middle of a Friday dinner rush, my main oven decided it wanted to be 75 degrees hotter than what I set it to. Lost an entire sheet pan of lamb racks before I caught it. Had to pull the probe and run everything on temp checks for the rest of the night, kept a notepad on the pass. Anyone else ever had a surprise calibration issue kill their timing on a busy shift?

3 comments

3 Comments

hollyl451mo ago

Last Friday my pastry section was running prep for a Saturday wedding order. My deck oven decided to spike 50 degrees right when I had three sheet pans of choux pastry going in. The first batch came out looking like golf balls instead of puffs. I spent the whole night adjusting my temps on the fly and babysitting each tray with a probe. Ended up tossing almost a full batch of eclairs because they just wouldnt puff right after that. It really messes up your whole flow when the oven decides to lie to you.

the_wren1mo ago

I gotta push back on that "oven decides to lie to you" part, @hollyl45. An oven is a machine. It doesn't have feelings or intentions. It's just doing what its parts let it do. If it spiked 50 degrees, it's either got a bad thermostat or you pushed too much heat into it right before loading. I'm not saying it's your fault, but blaming the oven like it's some trickster won't fix it. Calibrating those deck ovens takes ten minutes with a multimeter. Once you know the real temp, you just adjust your workflow around it. Tossing a whole batch of eclairs hurts, sure, but that's on you for not catching the issue sooner. Ovens don't lie. They just break and give you numbers that don't match reality.

cole9941mo ago

I hear what you're saying @the_wren but I gotta disagree with that "on you for not catching the issue sooner" part. A deck oven that spikes 50 degrees out of nowhere isn't just a calibration problem, that's a straight up mechanical failure. You can check your thermostats every morning and still get blindsided by a temp spike in the middle of a busy shift. Pastry is way more sensitive than bread or cake so one bad batch of choux can wreck your whole timeline. I'm not saying the oven has feelings like a person, but it definitely can betray your trust when you need it most. Sometimes you're just fighting the equipment and calling it a lie is just a baker's way of saying "this thing failed me at the worst possible moment.