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Cooking Halacha: Can I use the same oven

  • You cannot bake both dishes at the same time for three reasons:

    • They may touch or splatter while cooking and enter the other dish

    • The smell (Reicha) from one dish will enter the other

    • The steam from one dish will enter the other

  • Can I bake one after the other, lichatchila? 

  • The first thing is to make sure there are no meat particles or residue. Once clean, we can look to see if the three issues still apply.

    • The first aforementioned issue of touching or splattering doesn’t apply here, nor does the second, about the smell, because they’re not near each other. 

    • Regarding the steam, the issue is that the steam may enter the walls of the oven by the meat dish, and then when heated up, will be released into the milchig dish. You have poskim who say that our ovens today get hot enough to vaporize the steam, so it never reaches the walls, and there is no issue there either. Yet, there are more stringent poskim who say  the steam from a dish will reach and enter the walls of the oven, and when another dish is baked right after, it can release that steam and it can enter the food, making it basser bichalav and assur.

  • This only applies when we are talking about a wet dish. If the dish is dry, then it will not release the steam from the oven walls. 

  • So if you want to bake a milchig dish in a fleishig oven, according to the stringent poskim, it can only be done in one of two ways:

    • Either the milchig dish is dry

    • Or the wet dish is completely covered

  • It’s always best practice to ask your local Rav, but we hope you enjoyed learning the basics

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