Oven Help!

[Meenah]

DH and I just bought an oven today as ours died over a month ago (the cookie exchange put a fire under my butt). We bought a double wall oven (no choice, had to replace what fits in the hole in the wall), and the top oven is convection. WTH is convection and how do I cook with it. If I know me, I won't use the top oven for three years unless I have to, unless I learn what to do with it.

[Momo]

Re: Oven Help!

oooohh ahhh convection! It has to do with the circulation of the air, and achieving better cooked product in less amount of time...sorry that's all I know about it!

[Vanquisher]

Re: Oven Help!

http://www.taunton.com/finecooking/arti ... ovens.aspx

To get comfortable with a convection oven, you just have to start using it. The easiest way to do this is to experiment with your favorite recipes by cooking them at a slightly lower temperature and for a slightly shorter time than you normally would. But before you do that, or before you follow through with your plans to buy a convection oven, read on to learn how these ovens work, how different models vary, and what kind of results you can expect.


Guidelines for using convection

When following a recipe designed for a conventional oven, heat the convection oven to a temperature 25°F lower than the recipe suggests.
Expect food to be done in less time (as much as 25% less) than it would be in a conventional oven, even with the 25°F reduction. The longer you're cooking something, the greater the time savings; for instance, a turkey may cook an hour faster in a convection oven than in a regular oven, but you may only shave off a minute or two when baking cookies.
Use baking pans with low sides to get the full benefits of convection.
Go ahead and fill every rack in the oven, but still keep an eye on browning. Depending on your oven, you may have to rotate pans for even cooking.
Most ovens let you turn convection on and off. Play around with it. If you want a well-browned roast that's also slowly cooked, turn the convection on at the start or at the end, but off during the rest of cooking.
The fan sometimes blows parchment or foil around. Use a metal spoon or fork to hold down the parchment.



A convection oven circulates hot air with a fan
Unlike conventional radiant (also called thermal) ovens, convection ovens have a fan that continuously circulates air through the oven cavity. When hot air is blowing onto food, as opposed to merely surrounding it, the food tends to cook more quickly. A short version of the scientific explanation for this is that moving air speeds up the rate of heat transference that naturally occurs when air of two different temperatures converges. To help understand this, consider wind chill: When cold air blows against you on a blustery winter day, you feel colder more quickly than you do on a windless day of the same temperature.

This acceleration effect is one reason for the superior results you get from convection. The rush of heat speeds up the chemical reactions that occur when food cooks. The butter in a pie crust or a croissant releases its steam quickly, creating flaky layers. The skin of a roasting chicken renders its fat and browns more quickly, so the meat cooks faster and stays juicier. The sugars in roasting vegetables and potatoes begin caramelizing sooner, creating crisp edges, moist interiors, and deep flavors. Overall, food cooked in a convection oven is usually done about 25% faster than it is in a conventional oven.

Another benefit of all this circulating hot air is more even cooking. In a conventional oven, baking three racks of cookies at the same time is asking for trouble (see "The cookie convection test," below). The cookies on the bottom rack closest to the heating element, as well as those on the top rack where hot air rises, will be overcooked before the cookies on the middle rack are done. Convection cooking, with hot air moving all around the oven, can eliminate hot and cool spots for more even cooking. And when you can bake 50 cookies at once, your oven is operating a lot more efficiently. This even heating feature gives a great boost to roasts, too. For instance, if you roast a turkey in a convection oven, it will brown all over, rather than just on top (roasting the turkey on a rack in a low-sided baking dish or on a rimmed baking sheet helps to encourage this). It will also be done much more quickly.

The cookie convection test
We recently gave our test kitchen director's new convection wall ovens a test-spin. We baked three sheets of butter pecan cookies in the top oven with the convection turned on and the temperature 25°F below what the recipe called for. We baked three more sheets of cookies in the lower oven with no convection, just the standard radiant heat set at the temperature the recipe called for. The cookies on each rack in the top oven (a total of 45 cookies) all cooked evenly, and in the suggested time the recipe called for (16 minutes).

In the lower, non-convection, oven, after 7 or 8 minutes, the cookies on the lowest rack were obviously browning too much, too fast. A few minutes later, we pulled out that whole sheet, which had darkened beyond desirability. Meanwhile, the cookies on the middle rack were barely cooking. The top rack did cook perfectly in 15 minutes, but the middle rack plodded along for a few more minutes before being done.
Not all convection ovens are "true convection"
The extent to which you get these marvelous results depends a lot on the particular convection oven you're using. The best—and most efficient—convection ovens blow heated air into the oven cavity. This means they have a third heating element (in addition to the usual top and bottom elements in a radiant oven) located near or around the fan in the back of the oven. This element heats the air to a uniform temperature before it enters the oven cavity. In many ovens, the third heating element is covered by a baffle, or a panel, which channels air sucked in by the fan past the heating element and back out into the oven.

The appliance industry generally calls this type of oven "true convection," "third-element convection," or "European convection" (first popularized in Europe), so these are the terms to look for when shopping. In an effort to distinguish themselves, however, some manufacturers have come up with their own names. Dacor, for instance, calls its technology "Pure Convection" because its third-element convection also uses a special filtering system that prevents odors from being transferred from one item to another cooking in the same oven.

Convection ovens without a third heating element generally cook less evenly. In the worst examples, this type of oven will have a fan mounted on the outside of the oven and will actually blow unheated air into the oven cavity, randomly mixing up hot and cold air. In most of these ovens, though, the fan is mounted on the inside of the oven cavity, but the air blowing around the food won't be a uniform temperature. With the bottom radiant element fully heated, the oven will have hot and cool spots.

You'll find most "true convection" ovens in built-in wall ovens or slide-in ranges, not countertop models. If you're looking for the benefits of convection cooking, you should really upgrade your range or wall ovens rather than buy a countertop convection oven. Full-size ovens generally have better circulation and ventilation, and they may include a filtering system. They're usually self-cleaning, too. If, however, you're short on space and looking for extra oven capacity, a countertop convection oven might be right for you. Some of the better models do have heating elements integrated with the fan.

[poky]

Re: Oven Help!

Our fancy-schmancy toaster oven has convection, and I *love* it. If/when I get to buy an oven it will have convection. It gets better, more even cooking in way less time. Very very nice.

and, after reading heidi's thing: it's probably not *true* convection, but it's still way better than regular radiant heat cooking!

Re: Oven Help!

I used to have a convection oven. I miss it. Anyway, I agree with Lily on the reduced cooking time. Check things a bit earlier. Is it convection all the time or does it have a convection setting?

[alison]

Re: Oven Help!

This is a good problem to have. Enjoy your oven!

[Meenah]

Re: Oven Help!

It is actually two separate ovens. The top is convection and the bottom is regular.

[Meenah]

Re: Oven Help!

The oven was finally installed yesterday. It is a double wall oven. I absolutely love the convection oven. I've used it twice and it is great.