Bagels are not baking in the center or the bottom
Hi -
For 7 months I've been baking boiled bagels at a hoagie shop in their basement. Gas Convection oven. Boiled and then baked for 27-30 mins at 375. Admittedly, their oven was a little wonky and sometimes the temperature was under 375 and sometimes over. However, I always had consistently beautifully baked bagels with nice crisp bottoms.
Now I've just started baking on someone elses gas convection oven, 375, same process, but while the tops are getting nice and baked, the bottoms are still lightly colored and soft, and the middles are slightly raw. I'm having to bake so many extra minutes that the bagels are getting hard just to get them fully baked.
Any tips? Should I be reducing the temperature here? I have no other sense of what could be causing such a drastically different bake.
All my best and cheers,
Jacob
I see three possibilities.
1. The new oven might be moving more air than the previous oven. So the surfaces of the bagel that are exposed, cook faster than the inner part and the bottom, which are not exposed to moving air.
2. The new oven might run hotter than the old.
3. In the new oven, the deck surface on which the bagels sit might not be not heating up as much as the deck surface of the old. This could be simply because the deck stone is bigger/thicker and takes longer to pre-heat, come up to temp. Or, something more tricky like a clogged lower burner, or a malfunctioning lower thermostat.
In a convection oven, desired air temp is achieved before the baking surface/stone reaches the desired temp. If your oven does not have a "lower" thermostat that takes a reading of the stone, or reads it incorrectly, that could throw things off -- you'd have hot air, but a cool(er) stone/surface.
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Did you flip the bagels over mid-bake in the old oven?
Are you flipping the bagels over in the new oven?
FWIW, I bake bagels at much higher temps.
I bake my bagels on a steel in an oven that is preheated to 500 and then drop it to 450 when the bagels are in. I use Peter Reinhart's method and I have consistently been impressed with them.
I would bump up the temp on your oven and get an oven thermometer. Good luck!