Advantages of Convection Ovens

A convection oven uses a fan to force heat onto the surfaces of food. You can cook anything in a convection oven that you can cook in a conventional oven as long as the food does not require a lid and can be cooked on a shallow pan or baking sheet. The advantages of convention ovens have brought the oven back into prominence despite its high price tag.

Faster Cook Time

A convection oven uses fans to forces heat on food. The forced air results in cooking times as much as 25% faster than a conventional oven. The convection oven can also quickly warm-up food. Because it does not use microwave technology, convection cooking is safer than microwave cooking when you want to cook something fast. Food will heat more evenly in a convection oven than in a microwave oven.

Simultaneous Cooking

The heat source in a conventional oven is either on the top or the bottom of the oven box. Because of that, you are restricted by how much you can put into the oven and still get it all to cook evenly and without a longer cook time. In the convection oven, where hot air is circulating in the oven, you can fill multiple racks. Even with the racks completely filled in a convection oven, all food surfaces will receive even cooking.

Cheaper

The circulating air of the convection oven means foods will cook faster. The shortened cook time means less energy is used so you save money.

With a conventional oven, you wouldn’t have the option to completely fill the oven and expect all the food to cook evenly. You would need to run the conventional oven longer to prepare lots of food. With the convection oven, because you can cook more food at one time, you are saving money on energy costs.

Tastier Food

Heat blowing on the surface of meat causes it to brown evenly while at the same time searing in flavors. Meat cooked this way will be juicy. The center of vegetables cooked in a convection oven come out moister and with better flavor than vegetables cooked in a conventional oven.

More Even Cooking

Foods, like cookies, will cook through evenly in a convection oven reducing the chance of burning. By comparison, in a conventional oven, cookies can burn on the edges before the center of the cookie has baked through. If you have more than one cookie sheet in a conventional oven, you may find some of the cookies on one sheet will brown (even burn) while others will not. The second sheet will also bake at a different rate, even if both sheets were added to the conventional oven at the same time. The even baking in a convection oven will find all the cookies baking at the same rate no matter how many racks are filled.
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Sources: http://www.finecooking.com/articles/convection-ovens.aspx; http://www.convectionovennow.com/page/320364225

Reference:

• www.myrecipes.com/recipes/convection-oven