My new oven combines convection, conduction and radiation methods to cook. The manual is skimpy about what that means. Any ideas out there?
Convection is circulation in a liquid or gas caused by differences in temperature. Hot air rises, cool air drops, this is convection. Convection in an oven keeps the air from stratifying (forming layers), so the heat is more even throughout the oven and ‘new’ heated air is always coming in contact with the food. In some ovens an electric fan is used to circulate the air much more rapidly than it would circulate normally, and this can cook food more rapidly by bringing even more hot air into contact with the food.
Conduction is the transfer of heat from one object to another as they touch. Hot air touches the food, the food gets hotter, the air gets cooler. Conduction is probably the main method by which the food is heated when baking. As far as I know, conduction in an oven refers only to the transfer of heat from the air the to the food, and is pretty much the same in any non-microwave type oven.
Radiation could mean a couple of things. It could refer to microwave radiation (this is what I’d guess) or to simple heat radiation from a heating element or burner in a conventional oven.
Microwave ovens don’t heat the air very much like conventional ovens do. So to get the browning action associated with conventional ovens, some microwave ovens incorporate features from conventional ovens.
So I’d guess your new oven is a microwave type oven that also has some method (probably an electric heating element) that will also heat the air in the oven, and then a fan that will force that hot air into contact with the food. During cooking you can probably select any or all three methods, depending on what you’re cooking.
Ugly
I typed your thread title into google and came up with a bunch of places. This site even explains where the word barbeque comes from.