Cooking and drying are certainly the most complicated par in salt dough art!

Principle to know:
Drying or cooking correctly will guarantee your salt dough objects to last a long time.

Air drying is alright for small and thin objects. Let the objects dry a week on a grill before painting or varnishing. 

Several methods exist depending on the oven, and on the time allowed to check the object.

If the object air dried a little, start cooking at 50°C. After about 30 minutes, you can gently increase up to 100°C. Then you have to estimate the cooking time, the thicker the object, the longer it needs to dry!

For each centimeter, count roughly 2 hours at 100°C. It obviously also depends on your oven. So check out from time to time your object, it should sound hollow if it is well cooked!

For those who want to brown the objects, increase the temperature at the end up to 170-200°C and check very often.

The best thing to do is to cook the object at once (thus at a constant temperature) in order to prevent cracks due to the cold/hot variation.

If you have prepared the object on aluminum, remove it at the middle of the cooking so as to put the object directly on the grill. This way both sides of the objects can dry.