Baking – Smoke detector goes off when baking chicken breast

bakingmeatolive-oiloven

Smoke comes out of my oven when I bake chicken breast fillets. As soon as I open the oven door I can see some smoke escaping, and 30 seconds later both fire alarms are going off. This has never happened when baking other foods (pies, cakes, etc..).

I've been trying to figure out what it is that's causing all the smoke. The ingredients are…

  • 1kg frozen chicken breast fillets
  • 4 teaspoons soy sauce
  • 8 teaspoons extra virgin olive oil
  • granulated garlic
  • italian spice

I bake the chicken on two baking sheets lined with foil. I set the oven to 375 and let it bake for about 23 minutes. I don't bother letting the oven preheat.

Last week I came across some information that said extra virgin olive oil smokes at 375, so today I dropped the temperature down to 350 and tried to cook for a few minutes longer. The fire alarms still went off.

Best Answer

Just in case, is it just something that dripped into the oven? Unless you've baked something else since you started having problems with the chicken, just preheat it and see if there's any smoke. (Or inspect the bottom, but you might miss something.) If there's any smoke heating an empty oven, then you need to clean it.

Assuming that's not it, most likely it's still the olive oil. Depending on the oil, some of it will indeed smoke at 350F, and on top of that, it's possible that your oven is actually hotter than it thinks. Unless you've checked the temperature with a thermometer, it's quite possible the temperature is 25-50 degrees higher than it claims, especially if it's old. You could try lowering the temperature further.

But really, there's not really much point cooking this with extra virgin olive oil. It loses its flavor when you heat it to those temperatures, even if it doesn't smoke. You'd be better off just using a neutral oil (vegetable oil or whatever you prefer), and if you want olive oil flavor, add a bit after you're done baking. You probably don't actually need very much oil when baking, so you could reduce the oil there, and make up for it with olive oil at the end.

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