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So your roast has been cooking in the oven for the last 2 hours and it's now ready to be taken out. If you used a gas or electric oven to cook this meal, you perhaps could have saved energy and cash!
When you switch an oven off, it takes a little while for the temperature to drop dramatically. That's energy wasted which costs you and the environment. As a general guideline, you can try turning the oven off 5 minutes early per hour of recommended cooking time; e.g. if the usual cook time is 2 hours, switch it off at 1hr and 50 minutes.
That 10 minutes might not sound like much, but if you are doing this a couple of times a week over a year, you could save 40,000 watts of electricity. That's enough to light a room with a compact fluorescent 24 hours a day for over 100 days! Or to put it another way, you can save up to 20,000 pounds of carbon going into the atmosphere if your electricity is generated by coal.
Comments or added information you can share relating to power usage when cooking? We'd love to hear from you - add your thoughts below.
I do use this technique with foods that have to be baked for an hour or more, like roasted vegetables (halve a winter squash, put it upside down on a baking sheet) and banana bread. But for cookies, brownies, or other baked goods that are perfectly cooked at 20 minutes and overcooked at 25 minutes, this technique is risky unless you have had plenty of practice in gauging just how much extra browning that five minutes provides.
