Convection Oven Thoughts
Advantages
A well-designed convection oven is great, and has some advantages over more traditional ovens, which have no circulating fan.
- Convection ovens offer more even baking. Because of the fan, the heating is more uniform throughout the inside of a convection oven and this means more uniform baking of food.
- Also, you can put more than one item at a time into a convection oven without affecting the oven’s performance.
- Convection ovens have fewer hot and cold spots within due to their more uniform heating characteristics. Thus, the entire interior of a convection oven is roughly assumes roughly the same temperature.
- Convection ovens are less impacted by lining their shelves with aluminum foil for example, to contain messes. We did this once in our traditional oven, and wondered why it took so long to bake our pizza that night. But sitting items on cookie trays or aluminum foil in a convection oven should cause no bake time increases.
- Convection ovens generally brown foods faster than non forced convection types.
- Convection ovens run cooler. The heating elements need not be heated to such high temperatures because more of the heat they produce actually reaches the food being cooked.
Disadvantages
- However, with a convection oven, you have the additional fan motor(s) to worry about. But that would not typically be an issue if the motors are of good quality.
- Sometimes, the fans used in convection ovens can be either under- or over-sized. An undersized one would essentially turn the oven into a traditional radiant style type, with the inherent disadvantages of that design in full force.
- An over-sized fan system can cause too much heat to be forced out of the oven, making the surrounding area warm, and decreasing the oven’s overall energy efficiency.
- Opening the convection oven’s door during baking can drastically impact food cook times. So keep the door closed until it’s time to take the food out.
- Though you can cook more items at the same time in a convection oven, be careful of how you place the pans. To avoid choking off air flow, leave an inch or so of open space between each tray, dish, or other baking container.