– how come when you double the temperature it doesn’t cut the cooking time in half?
In: Physics
TLDR Water boils at a certain temperature. Any extra heat just boils it more. It’s still the same temperature
Increasing the temperature in an oven increases the delivery of energy to the surface of the food, but for it to be cooked, that heat needs to be conducted through to the middle. This process doesn’t scale linearly with outside temperature, so if you half the cooking time, it will still be raw/undercooked.
Because you aren’t doubling the temperature. If you are cooking something at 350F and want to double the temperature, you have to set the oven to about 1200F. Setting the temp at 700F is not double the temperature.
It’s because our temperature scales dont start at zero. It’s like if we said “lets only start counting birthdays after they turn 21”. 21=0, 22=1birthday, 23=2birthdays etc. Changing how we count birthdays doesnt mean that the 23year old is now twice as old as the 22year old.
First of all, you would have to be quite precise before “doubling the temperature” was a meaningful action. 25 Celsius room temperature can be doubled, to a physicist, into 323.15 Celsius, or 613.17 Fahrenheit. Either arbitrary scale can be converted to the absolute Kelvin scale, the only one besides Rankine that can be properly “doubled”.
But you didn’t have that in mind, did you?
A different doubling: let’s think about the action of putting heat into the food. Heat is a different metric: it’s measured in joules, or with respect to time as joules-per-second (aka watts).
And when you cook, you put heat into the food. And you could double the wattage of heat put into the food, and so ideally double the total joule-age of heat put into it. But you’d probably screw up the food, and I don’t think Gordon Ramsay would allow you to call what you’ve done “cooking” anymore.
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