Serious question, why does nobody check their oven temp with a $9 thermometer before baking bread?
I baked sourdough for almost two years before I finally put a cheap oven thermometer in there, and mine runs 35 degrees hot. That means every recipe I followed was basically wrong, and I kept blaming my starter and my flour for dense loaves. A friend who works at a bakery in Portland asked me one simple question last week, do you know your real oven temp, and I felt like a fool. I checked it the same night, and the dial said 450 while the thermometer read 485. My crusts have been browning way too fast this whole time and I thought that was normal. So for anyone still trusting the dial, what temp does your oven actually hit when you set it to 450?