Analysis / Oven Logic

• Forensic scientists are taught to use "Degree hours" when calculating how long a body had been dead, because many of the methods they use to judge this, rigor, decomposition, the speed of development of insect larvae, are temperature dependent. This is basically oven logic, but it works because A, despite what CSI teaches everyone, the vast majority of bodies are not frozen by super-intelligent serial killers trying to trick the investigators, nor dumped in Turkish baths for over elaborate reasons and so are usually left at whatever the local air temperature is, and B, calibration curves exist so you can check the local weather reports, and so based on known recent temperatures adjust your time of death accordingly. Still deeply problematic, however, if the bodies are left exposed to the elements for any length of time due to the temperature differences involved.
• If you increase the power output of a microwave, it will take less time to cook something, based on the principle of how they work. However, you only need to worry about this if you're using a commercial microwave (in convenience stores), which are way more powerful than home microwaves; and if used improperly invariably under or over cook one's food (or occasionally: both at the same time, if it's an item with multiple layers such as a burrito. The reason these items call for low power and longer cook times is that the innermost layers have to cook via indirect heat from the outer layers). There are also some microwaves that are lower-power than standard home microwaves; these are typically the small ones you see sitting on top of a mini-fridge in a college dorm room. Many frozen foods will list a second, longer cooking time to use in these low-power microwaves.
• Rice is best cooked with a ratio of water to rice 1:1, with an additional half cup of water for evaporation loss. So one cup of rice should be cooked with one-and-a-half cups, two cups two-and-a-half, and so on. Seeing just one cup:one-and-a-half cups without understanding why may naturally lead to the conclusion that four cups of rice is to be made with six cups of water, which results in congee instead of rice. If you use the proper amount of water, but turn the heat up too high the rice will caramelize instead: if you have frequent trouble with rice sticking to your pot, this is why.
  • Risotto is infamously annoying for this reason. Because it uses so little liquid it needs to be cooked on extremely low heat so that the rice slowly releases it's starch rather than caramelizing. This process takes between 20-30 minutes depending on the exact type of rice, and what other ingredients you use. Depending on the recipe, you may need to stand at your stove and stir it constantly (although some recipes avoid this by using certain preparation techniques). If you have an elderly gas stove without a special low-powered burner, this may prove completely impossible. You can make very similar dishes with couscous, quinoa or farro which take considerably less time and are much less heat sensitive. You'll sometimes see these dishes listed as "risotto" on restaurant menus, but they technically aren't: the word "risotto" means "little rice".
• There are two types of cooking appliances that apply this trope in its more realistic fashion. The slow cooker takes the "less temperature = longer time" approach cooking things like stews, soups and sauces at (relatively) low temperatures, usually so they can be made in large batches. Pressure cookers on the other hand use the "more heat = less time" approach, using the fact that water boils at higfher temperatures if you increase the air pressure. This can be done to cook certain foods that normally need to be boiled for an extended period in a reasonable amount of time, or cook normal ingredients very quickly.
• This same logic frequently occurs in businesses where work is measured in "man-hours" ^note a unit of measurement roughly equal to the amount of work one person can complete in one hour. If a job is estimated to take X man-hours to complete, then simply throwing more people at the project will decrease the time to completion, right? This mindset is best summed up in an old joke: if it takes a woman nine months to make a baby, then obviously nine women can make a baby in one month.
• The reason why this trope exists is that in a lot of cookbooks the author will write things like "you can increase the temperature to decrease the cook time". It's not that this isn't true, it's just that people who lack cooking experience don't understand what this means: or that there are some severe limitations to this principle. Generally speaking, the most you can shave off the cook time is 10 minutes: and some recipes are too finicky even for that. The cook has to keep in mind as well that certain kinds of ingredients will instantly change state at certain temperatures: milk curdles, sugars and starches will caramelize, spices will burn, yeast will die etc. If one of those things happens when it wasn't supposed to the result will likely be a difficult to clean up inedible mess. On the other hand, certain beloved recipes were almost certainly discovered this way.
  • the dangers of doing this in the other direction (cooking something for longer on lower heat) are considerably less: but with the tradeoff that certain recipes will simply not work (because you actually want an ingredient to melt/caramelize/burn). Slow-cookers work by extending the cooking time so much that it's just as convenient as cutting the cooking time in half (and, because there is no danger of ingredients burning, this can also eliminate the need to stir or agitate). But, the hidden cost of this is that the recipes can be supremely inflexible. Things like using low-fat milk, substituting oil for butter, or eliminating the nuts can have extreme effects on the recipe's cooking time. This is because the slow transfer of heat through the dish must take place in a very particular way, or the chemistry just won't work. But on the plus side, following the recipe WILL consistently result in an excellent product because the slow cooking eliminates 99% of the possible ways a recipe could fail.