Baking in gas oven does not brown the top

This is an issue I've had to come to terms with myself. I spent most of my catering life spoilt by having a massive fan assisted electric ovens with space for 24 trays at once. Then one day I left it all behind to work in a tiny 2 chef kitchen where all we had was a bottom heated gas oven. The first 6 months was a nightmare. It's still not easy even to this day but I'll share a couple of tricks me and my colleague have found.

Its all about the airflow:

Forget about the middle shelf for baking it's useless. It's there for roast joints and ... Stuff. Get your baked goods on the top shelf. The reason you are not getting browned tops is all the heat is hitting the bottom of your tray, by the time it reaches the top of your oven and bounces back down to your food it's nowhere near the temperature required.

In order to help cushion the bottoms of your food and direct the heat towards the top, you need to put a tray slightly larger than the tray you are cooking on, on the shelf below. You can add water to this tray for bread and Yorkshire puddings as the steam helps regulate the heat also, but when cooking pastries I find it makes the pastry more likely to split and crack.

Locate the thermostat in your oven. In ours, it's at the top right, in the middle. Always ensure there is sufficient space around it for the heat to hit it. If it's blocked in any way you'll find the oven just keeps pumping heat out. It'll be 300c at the bottom but the thermostat will still think it 100c.

Sometimes you will find the tops are now cooking perfectly but the bottoms are a little less done. At that point, you will be safe to either move the food down a shelf to help crisp the bottoms or if making scones you can safely flip them over just to finish off.

Good luck.

It sounds like your oven may be miss-calibrated. I would get an oven thermometer and check to be sure it's heating properly.

A couple of things to check;

1.Make sure you're using the middle rack in your oven so that the heat can circulate.

2.Make sure you're using a pan that doesn't take up the ENTIRE rack. Space around the sides will allow for better circulation.

Possible Solutions:

1. Try setting your oven temperature 25 degrees less than what your recipes call for. A lower temp will aid in even heating.

2. Place a pan of water on the rack below the product you are baking. The steam created will help even out the oven's temperature all around. (This is good for cookies and cakes but if you're attempting bread, macaroons, or more delicate pastries the added moisture could affect your end product.

3. A baking stone placed on the bottom rack and preheated with the oven will allow for a bit of a buffer in heat fluctuations. (A pizza stone works great, or any Unglazed quarry tile from the hardware store)

Perhaps it's because I grew up in a house with a gas oven and have had gas ovens in most of the apartments I lived in for years, but I've never had problems baking with them. But I've also never had the kinds of experiences discussed in this question, even in multiple apartments with cheap old stoves. (The only place I ever had problems cooking things was with a cheap electric stove/oven that would burn the tops of everything.)

If things like this ever happened to me, I would seriously consider having the oven checked or serviced. It sounds like the air is simply not circulating properly and/or may be vented (or have the vent partly obstructed) in a way that is not allowing the oven to heat uniformly. Or perhaps the thermostat is really off. You could start by checking with an oven thermometer on various shelves while baking and see if you're seeing vastly different temperatures at the top and bottom. Maybe those who grew up with electric ovens or convection ovens just bake differently in ways that I'd never think of, but I currently have an electric oven, and I don't do much differently from when I baked in gas ovens, and everything pretty much works the same. (The only differences I've noticed usually come from venting issues: gas ovens are built with more venting due to combustion and gases, so electric ovens generally act more tightly sealed -- which can be an issue for steam venting occasionally, but can be an advantage for steaming bread or something.)

Anyhow, I agree with other answers' advice to bake on a higher rack and use a larger pan/stone/cookie sheet on a lower rack to deflect some of the heat from the bottom if the bottoms of food are getting done too fast. (I needed to do that above just about everything I baked in my miscalibrated cheap electric oven I had years ago that would burn tops.)

I also agree with the idea of trying to lower temperature slightly on some recipes. This may cause rising problems in some food that depend on rapid "oven spring" in the beginning of a bake. But if you don't need that hot heat in an initial burst, a lower temperature may allow the top of the food to dry out over a longer bake and then begin to brown.

Similarly, you might consider different pans or cookie sheets, particularly if they are dark-colored. Dark pans will brown baked goods more quickly due to heat radiating from them more strongly.

Basically: browning reactions don't start to happen quickly until the outer layer of the food dries out (and can thus increase in temperature above boiling). The top of food starts to turn brown once it dries out from the air circulation (i.e., a "crust" forms), and the bottom of food starts to turn brown when the radiant heat from the pan dries the "crust" out. You want to speed up the former (e.g., by placing the food higher in the oven) while slowing down the latter (e.g., by blocking any direct heat on the bottom, using light-colored pans, and perhaps lowering the overall temperature to allow time for the top to dry out and catch up with the radiant heat from the bottom).

I'd agree with @Athanasius that this seems like a bad example of the gas oven, as I also have rarely had troubles of this sort with the vast majority of gas ovens.

I have however had similar troubles with what I'd characterize as a probable bad gas oven (from design through construction) and compensated for them pretty successfully.

Being on vacation in a rural area, there was not a lot of fancy stuff available, but there was aluminum (or aluminium for those that prefer) foil, which was all it took. I just folded a sheet onto the shelf, shiny side down, hanging slightly below the shelf, to reflect away some of the bottom heat. I left space at the sides for air to circulate. No more burned bottoms.

I think I have similar gas oven as you have.What I do is bake for some time from bottom till I see slight brownish bottom of bread/ bun then I switch to top gas burners( broiler) and bake. This is risky as the bun becomes brown very fast. Problem is the browning is not even and get some dark patches here and there.

I will try keeping the bottom tray with holes on side ( which I received with the oven) and try to bake.