Technology and design ethics in regards to the kitchen (and the appliances contained within) are constantly changing and evolving with the passage of time. The kitchen of 2016 is obviously a very different place from the kitchen of 1986, and most would argue all the better for it. Sometimes however, it pays to look back into innovations of the past, because the technological advances and trends of days gone by are still serious principals in appliance design even now. Today, we’d like to talk to you about convection ovens; one of the alternative oven designs from the past that your brand new modern style kitchen could benefit from using.
Historically speaking, convection ovens have actually been around for some time; the earliest instance of a domestic convection oven was the Malleable Iron Range Company Convection Oven, which was available in 1967; to say the technology has improved since then would be a massive understatement, however. Essentially, convection ovens work by utilising a fan as part of their design. Conventional Ovens primarily rely on two factors when heating up your food: 1) the process of natural convection that occurs within an oven during operation, and heat energy coming off of the walls of the oven. This typically means that the food takes a fair while to cook, even at higher temperatures. By comparison, the use of a fan in convection ovens distributes the heat within the oven much more evenly, removing the cool blanket that naturally occurs around food within a bog standard oven.
What does this mean for you in practical terms, though? Well, for starters, food will cook far more quickly in a convection oven, at a far lower temperature then it would otherwise require. It will also cook much more evenly then it would in a regular oven, resulting in a better quality of cooked meals overall.
Not all convection ovens are born the same, however, and consumers would do well to remember that there will be variations in design. The biggest variation- and the one that you need to be most wary of when buying your oven- is that some convection units will contain their heat source within the chamber of the oven itself, whereas others will have it contained in a separate compartment away from (but still close to) the main chamber. Typically, ovens that go with the former design vastly improves the heat transfer to the food, especially from the initial cold start at the very beginning of the cooking process. Conversely, the latter design method will greatly reduce (but not completely eliminate) the amount of heat radiation coming off of the walls of the oven. Neither method is the one-true way for a convection oven to be designed, and it will ultimately come down to personal preference as to which of the two design you’ll favour.
Convection ovens show that sometimes, the methods and techniques from decades passed are still viable in the fast paced world of today, and can fit in just fine with your trendy modern kitchens perfectly.