Cooking

Oven Temperature Conversion: Move Between °F and °C

4 min readCooking

An American recipe calls for 400°F, your oven reads in Celsius, and one wrong turn of the dial means a pale batch of cookies you cannot un-bake. Oven conversion is the most common temperature ask in the kitchen, and it is easier than it looks. The honest rule: °C = (°F − 32) × 5/9.

The five dial settings you actually need

Most home baking hangs out in a tight band. Commit these and you will rarely do arithmetic mid-kitchen:

Run any of these through the converter if you want decimals — 400°F is exactly 204.4°C, and your oven dial will thank you for rounding.

Air fryer is a different beast

Air fryers circulate heat so aggressively they run hot. A rule of thumb is to drop the oven temperature by about 20°C (or 25°F) and check earlier. Cooking a 425°F oven recipe in an air fryer? Set closer to 380°F. The appliance moves heat far faster than a still oven, and recipes borrowed between them need that allowance.

"An oven dial is a promise the recipe trusted. Convert the number, round for the dial, and check a minute before the timer — browning beats algorithms every time."

Gas mark and convection, briefly

Older UK recipes use gas marks (gas mark 4 ≈ 350°F). Convection ovens run hot too, so many cooks lower a conventional temperature by 15–25 degrees. Whenever a recipe is fuzzy, treat the number as a starting target, not a verdict, and pull early.

Why one wrong number ruins a bake

Baking is chemistry with a timer. Maillard browning and caramelization need specific heat windows, so 20 degrees off changes texture and color, not just timing. That is why cooks translate precisely before the batch goes in. Set the dial right once and the rest of the recipe can do its job.