A while back my wife complained about her cooker apparently not reaching temperature. The fairly new high spec. electric cooker has two fan ovens, one large and one small. She found she got different results in them despite setting the same temperature, the small oven apparently being cooler than the large oven. Also variable results depending on quantiles of food in them. To try to get to bottom of the problems I ran a series of tests with thermocouples in the ovens, over a range of temperature settings. What I found was that it took a much longer time for the set temperature to be reached on a tray in the centre of the oven than indicated by the oven thermostat, and the problem was worse in the smaller oven which had a smaller heating element. Things also got worse as the temperature setting was increased and the loading of the oven increased. My conclusion was that the oven thermostat effectively measures air temperature at some remote point remote rather than the “body” temperature of the oven, and that there is a significant lag before the true required temperature is reached within the cooking vessel.
To give an example: In the case of my cooker the small oven, which has a smaller element than the large oven, took 3-4 cycles of the thermostat before a temperature within 5 degrees of the demanded temperature of 180 degrees was reached. The large oven took 2-3 cycles to reach temperature. This was with effectively empty ovens.
My wife now allows a few minutes extra time after the thermostat light on the oven has gone out for the first time before assuming that the required temperature has been reached, and she now gets consistent expected results.