What Is A Convection Oven? Everything About Convection Ovens

If you are used to cooking with ordinary ovens, you may be confused about a convection oven. You have probably heard about home cooks throwing around words like “convection cooking” and “a convection oven setting” without knowing what it means.

So, if you’re wondering what a convection oven does and how you would use it or if you’re looking to buy a good one (with microwave function) for your kitchen, here is everything you need to know beforehand.

What Is A Convection Oven?

A tabletop convection oven differs from ordinary ovens in structure, function, and construction. While regular ovens create a high temperature within the oven’s environment to heat or cook food, a convection oven produces concentrated heat energy that ensures uniform heating.

A convection oven comes with an exhaust system and a fan. The exhaust system takes air from the atmosphere and produces hot air. The exhaust system then vents the hot air into the atmosphere, and the food is ready to devour! The fan then blows the hot air inside the premises of the oven, surrounding the food placed inside.

The convection oven works better and quicker than regular ovens because it sends heat directly to the surface of the food in the range and cooks the food evenly. On top of that, convection ovens produce over 25 percent more heat than a regular oven.

A great way to illustrate why convection ovens function better is by considering how your body temperature changes in the winter. Our body tends to get colder in a windy winter than in a windless winter. This is because cold air blows against your body directly during windy days, making the effects of cold more drastic.

An additional tip: Unlike kitchen appliances that use hot air for cooking, CVAP oven systems use ‘humidity’ to improve the food-holding environment. Imagine that your fried chicken is crispy on the outside but moist inside. A convection oven is good, but we should keep an eye on improvements.

What Does A Convection Oven Do?

A convection oven can practically be used to heat or cook anything. But home and professional cooks have found that it is best for roasting. You can roast different meat products like chicken and expect a fully cooked meal within minutes.

This is because convection ovens are great at heating the meat evenly while creating a crispy layer on the surface, which works miracles with baked potatoes. Since such ovens let air escape their box, they can create a drier environment where the moisture from meat or vegetables can run, and the sugars within the food can be caramelized, causing the browning of the food. Hence, convection ovens can also be used for baking.

Experts rave about convection ovens for their ability to bake bread efficiently. You can bake bread, cookies, biscuits, brioche buns, tart shells, and more- all with a single convection oven. Since this kind of oven circulates heat around the food, it allows the dough to puff up and produce more volume while creating a browning surface. You can heat or bake food and toast things like bread or nuts.

See also: Are Wooden Spoons Sanitary? Should They Be In Your Utensils?

How To Use A Convection Oven

It is effortless to use a convection oven. You only need to know a few instructions before you can get started. Here are a few pieces of information you need to keep in mind:

1. Temperature: Since you can set the temperature in a convection oven, you need to be mindful of how the settings are fixed and whether it is too high because a higher temperature can cause any food you want to heat to burn quickly. So, the first step of using a convection oven is to set the temperature at a comparatively low rate. The ideal temperature for it is usually 25 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Air circulation: Many people get convection ovens because of their reputation for evenly cooking food. But if the heat from the stove is not circulated correctly in the box, the food will not be adequately cooked. So, it would help if you made sure that the heated air can circulate the way it should. You can facilitate that by using trays, baking, roasting pans, etc., and avoiding foil coverings on the food.
3. Monitoring: Food usually cooks faster in convection ovens. So, if you don’t check how your food is cooked regularly, you might end up with burnt garbage. Hence, you need to check on the food every few minutes and change the temperature settings.

Apart from that, it is necessary to figure out how to use a convection oven by playing around with it a few times. This will help you understand what works best with it and help you enjoy its excellent results.

When To Use A Convection Oven

1. Roasting: It is highly recommended to use convection ovens for roasting meats and vegetables. Such food would take longer to cook on a stove or a regular oven. But because of how quickly and evenly a convection oven can heat food, you can cook meats and vegetables within a dry environment for crispy skin on the outside and ensure that the exteriors are fully caramelized for better flavoring.
2. Baking pies or pastries: The heat from a convection oven is excellent at melting fats and creating steam. So, the moisture can help to puff up pie doughs or pastries for a fluffy texture. Hence, you can bake excellent croissants with a convection oven.
3. Making cookies: When baking in a regular oven, you must rotate the cookie tray to ensure even heating. But since convection ovens are experts at the art of cooking evenly, it is much easier to bake large amounts of cookies quickly and at a time.
4. Toasting: Convection ovens are very efficient at toasting or dehydrating food. This is because it allows the food to remove moisture through the exhaust system quickly.
5. Heating-covered food: If you want to heat a food item without removing its moisture content, you can cover the dish with a lid and benefit from speedy cooking. So, you can use it for cooking a casserole dish!

The Best Convection Ovens

If you are keen on convection cooking but are confused about which oven to buy, you can get this one. It is one of the best convection ovens globally since it is both reasonably priced and highly functional in its capacity.

If you are looking for a more budget-friendly option, you can always check out the Hamilton Beach Easy Reach Convection oven. But if you are willing to splurge, the best chance of the fully-featured Wisco-620 Commercial Convection Countertop Oven.

In Conclusion

Cooking with convection ovens is easy, efficient, and quick. And this article should help you understand the basics of convection learning, its use, and its functions. Let me know if I miss anything or your questions in the comment section below. Many thanks for visiting Greenhouse Center, and see you around soon!