10 Convection Oven Recipes, Plus How to Get the Most Out of Your Appliance (2024)

FAQs

What foods cook best in a convection oven? ›

When to use convection. Convection cooking is ideal for foods that do better in a dry climate and where you want to encourage browning and crisping. So roasting meats, potatoes and vegetables are all ideal, and it's great for reheating things like fried chicken or baking pizza.

Converting Recipes for a Convection Oven

This is a fairly simple matter of either lowering the temperature or shortening the cooking time (or a bit of both). The simplest method is to set the oven 25 to 50 degrees lower than the recipe says. So if it says 400 F, you go with 375 or 350 F.

The convection setting also works best if you use low-sided pans or rimless baking sheets, especially when baking cookies or roasting vegetables. This allows for better air circulation around the food and helps crispy foods become even crisper.

Spray or rub oil or butter lightly over potato. Sprinkle salt over the potato. Place potato directly on convection oven rack. Bake at 375 degrees for 45 minutes or until done.

Convection is good for:

Roasting ham, turkey, roast-ready beef cuts, and similar meats. Roasting vegetables and potatoes for an extra crisp. Cookies and muffins—especially when you have a big batch to bake at once.

Avoid convection baking foods like cakes, quick breads, custards and other delicate desserts and pastries.

1. Expensive: Convection ovens can be more expensive than conventional ovens due to their additional technology. 2. Not as user-friendly: Cooking with a convection oven may require adjusting recipes and cooking times due to the oven's faster cooking times and lower temperature settings.

Convection Roast or Convection Bake Mode

A chicken roasted in Convection will be incredibly flavorful and juicy, very easy to cook and best of all you can cook several oven side dishes at the same time for an easy delicious meal.

Some recipes will suggest regular bake or convection, but as a general rule, don't use the convection setting for delicate desserts and pastries such as custards, souffle, chiffon and angel food cakes, to name a few.

Do you need to adjust recipes for convection oven? ›

While every oven is going to be a little different, you're basically looking at three ways to turn a conventional-oven recipe into a convection-oven recipe: Reduce cooking temperature by 25 degrees F (about 15 degrees C). Reduce cooking time by 25 percent. Reduce both temperature and time by less than 25 percent.

The key benefits of Convection cooking are:

So if you can cook food on multiple racks at one time with no transfer of flavor, then you can easily cook an entire meal in the oven at one time.

If you set the oven to convection bake at 350 degrees F it will run at 350. If your recipe calls for 350 degrees F for say, a roast, you'll need to lower the temp to 325 degrees F to compensate for the air racing around in the oven.

A convection oven is perfect for baking pizza. Because the hot air from it moves around, your pizza cooks more quickly than in a conventional oven. Because of this, your pizza will be crisper and have a more even surface than when you bake it in a traditional oven.

That's because convection ovens come equipped with a fan and an exhaust system to circulate hot air. Basically, your food is constantly enveloped in a warm hug, so you don't need to worry about moving it around while it cooks.

The convection can also dry out the inside of these recipes, such as bread, cake, soufflé, flan, or other baked goods so you want to steer clear of that setting if you want your final product to be nice and moist.

In fluids, such as water and air, convection is a much more efficient method of heat transfer than conduction. This difference in efficiency produced the dramatic difference in the time required to melt the ice. Although conduction was at work in both cases, it transferred much less heat than convection.

All ovens weren't created equal. While it may not matter to you what kind of oven you've got, it is very useful to understand the difference between an ordinary oven and a convection oven. Professional chefs swear by the advantages of convection ovens. That's because it cooks food slightly differently.

You don't need to switch out your pans or baking dishes for different materials when using convection heat, but you do want to make sure the air is circulating easily so that the time and temperature adjustments are correct. Opt for rimmed baking sheets or dishes with low sides and don't crowd your oven.