Home Appliances: Ovens

With the different types of cooking methods and installation styles available in ovens today, people looking to purchase a new oven may be easily confused by all the options. Here's some oven-speak to make your shopping trip a bit easier.

Conventional ovens use burning gas or an electric heating element to heat the oven and cook food. The downsides to these ovens are that heat is not always even throughout the oven and therefore, you may not be able to cook more than one dish at a time effectively in the oven, even if you have the space to fit it.

Convection ovens use a fan to move heated air through the oven, resulting in a more even heat throughout the oven, so you can use all the shelves. These ovens also are more energy efficient, heat faster, and can cook at lower temperatures. Convection ovens are either fan assisted or fan forced. In the fan assisted oven, the heating element and fan are separate, with the heating element on the bottom and the fan in the back. Fan forced convection ovens surround the fan with the heating element. Some ovens are combination conventional and convection ovens. There are also combination ovens that are microwave and convection ovens, which have many of the advantages of convection ovens, but cook faster and use even less energy than regular convection ovens.

The space you have for an oven will be another consideration in your purchase. Ovens may be installed in the wall, under a counter, or as part of a traditional stove/oven combination unit. Ease of cleaning may be a factor for some people. Standard ovens will have to be cleaned the old fashioned way, on your hands and knees with oven cleaner and a scrubbing pad. Self cleaning ovens have a super high temperature setting that are used with the oven otherwise empty and the door locked, that burn any food left in the oven to ash, which makes it easy to wipe out with a damp sponge. You can also use your vacuum cleaner to clean out ash and dust. Continuous cleaning ovens have a surface that helps absorb and spread out spills so that they can be burned off at lower temperatures. They can be cleaned periodically with a damp sponge as well. Larger spills will have to be cleaned similarly to a standard oven and stains may become permanent if left too long.