We bought a counter top model and were not the least bit impressed. When we replaced our stove, it had a convection setting that I’ve used a couple of times but I’m still not impressed. Am I missing something or are they not all they’re cracked up to be? Maybe I just haven’t found the right application yet.
I have heard from many that the convection oven is pretty meh until you get into high end models. We have a Miele convection oven, and I use the setting constantly. Miele ovens are not cheap.
Holy crap! I just googled them and if that’s what it takes, I’ll never get to enjoy one.
My sister used to have one. When she moved from that place and had to buy a new oven for her new place, she had no interest in paying for the convection upgrade. She did say she liked how it baked cookies and other small baked goods but it wasn’t worth the cost.
I’ve only used them working in restaurants where cooking large amounts and needing things done quickly are required. I don’t really see the need for one in a home.
Yeah, the big Vulcan industrial ones are a whole different animal. You open the doors and you get a blast of hot air coming out at you. The motor on those big ovens sticks a good 6 or 8 inches out the back and probably has a 6 inch diameter, it’s likely bigger than any motor in your house…except maybe the one in your furnace.
It’s nice than you can put 6 sheet pans in there and they’ll all cook (more or less evenly).
Also, at least in the home and industrial ones I’ve seen, the air current has a totally different pattern. In my home oven, it draws air in and blows it out from the same (kinda) place. It’s moving air, but not much. In the one I have at work, it draws are into the back and blows it out through the perforated sidewalls so it’s very evenly spread around.
The home one, I’ve never seen any real advantage to it. In fact, mine broke about 6 months after I got it. I finally fixed it just recently (15ish years later) and playing with it, I don’t see any huge advantage. Also, less and less recipes give convection directions like they did even 10 years ago. It wouldn’t surprise me if convection ovens got more and more rare.
I do use it on my toaster oven since the sheet pan that goes with it is the same size as the oven cavity. I figure it’s the only way to get the same amount of heat above and below what I have in there.
We’ve got a mid-range Maytag, and it does what it says. There are two options - “Convect Bake” which specifies a lower temperature than the temp in a recipe, and “Convect Roast”, which reduces the time by like 20-25%.
Honestly, we don’t use it too often- most stuff is either relatively fast cooking, like cookies for example, where 3 minutes per batch just doesn’t make much difference, or it’s for longer periods, where we’re usually not waiting on it anyway, so saving an hour isn’t much of a big deal. And there hasn’t ever been a lot of desire to drop temperatures arbitrarily.
What were you expecting it to do?
Here’s a nice write up on possible benefits and applications of convection:
Note that “25% shorter cooking time” and “turn it down 25 degrees” depend a lot of what you are actually cooking.
I was just paraphrasing the manual. Basically those were the “benefits” of the convection settings as listed- shorter time or lower temp.
About the only time we’ve seen it be notably superior is in roasting birds (chickens and turkeys).
I was expecting mine to do more than make noise.
Mine gets hot too.
I’m serious. What were you expecting it to do? It’s an oven, it heats things up. It heats things up in a slightly different way, but it’s still just externally applied heat.
If well made it will heat food on multiple levels in the oven equally, but not everyone needs that. The rest of the benefits are in the realm of “many wouldn’t notice unless they ran a controlled experiment” or replaced an oven with noticeable hot spots.
The way it was sold to my had it much closer to the speed and efficiency of a microwave. Cut cooking time in half. More even cooking. The last one might have a little merit.
Then I can understand your disappointment. The only way it could cut cooking time in half is if you have something you previously had to cook in batches due to the uneven heating of having multiple baking sheets at different levels.
We have a tabletop one.
It does a good job cooking, reduces cook temperature and time, and being smaller than the main oven, uses less energy.
Win-win-win in our household.
I used it to roast chicken, but in order to allow proper airflow you need to use a shallow pan. The shallow pan and the airflow seemed to distribute grease around the oven quite efficiently. After trying it twice, we stopped using it.
I just bought one with that option last fall but I haven’t messed with it yet. It wasn’t the feature I bought the model for. I’ll try it at some point, but I’m not in a rush.
I have a Wolf convection oven now, and previously to that I had a Dacor.
They really DO speed up cooking time, but as others mentioned, it really depends on what you’re cooking. I don’t notice much of a difference with baking, for example, although it does allow you to really fill up the oven and still get relatively even browning.
Roasting, it really shines. I roasted a 17.5# turkey for Thanksgiving last year. Standard advice is it would take ~4 hours to roast. I set my oven on “convection roast”, and the damn thing was done in 2 hours! Great to know, but it wasn’t the greatest turkey as it had to sit for 2 hours because the dinner schedule was assuming it’d take twice as long to cook. I took notes so that next year it won’t happen again (this is a new oven & it was the first time I’d made a turkey with it).
Convection ovens are useful for baking things like cookies because the temperature distribution is more even. You’re less likely to end up with some items underbaked and some overbaked.
We have had one (full size) for several years and enjoy it at times but don’t use that feature most of the time. It is great if you want something to be evenly crispy. You need room for the air to flow around the food, so I often use a baking sheet with a cooling rack on top to let the air circulate. Simple things like pizza rolls come out perfect without having to be turned over mid way. It also does a good job of making roasted poultry come out with a nice crispy skin.
We also have a convection microwave which is a combo of convection oven and microwave. The main thing we use this for is baked potatoes (well we use the microwave only setting for any normal microwave use). You can do the potatoes like you would in any other convection oven but in a smaller space, but if you are in a hurry just use the combo convection/microwave setting and you can have a very nice crispy on the outside and fluffy on the inside tater in about 10-15 minutes.