You may be a college student, a single person in a small apartment, or perhaps even a young family who lacks time and skill to be able to prepare a full course meal in a typical kitchen environment. Gas ovens or electric ovens are two very scary appliances in a kitchen when you don’t have much experience or idea of how to use them. A new trend in modern cooking and one that promotes fast, healthy eating is the use of convection cooking. Convection ovens are able to still provide the full benefits of fast home cooked meals without the fear of microwaved foods harming any of the natural ingredients or vitamins. Also with convection ovens, food can be cooked up to 50% faster than traditional oven cooking and yet still retain all of the flavor and taste. One newly popular type of countertop convection oven is known as a halogen oven.
Halogen ovens are just one kind of convection oven. The main difference of a halogen oven compared to other ovens is that they essentially use a different heating element. If you are new to convection oven technology, it might be a good time to discuss how they work. Convection cooking cooks food by circulating air uniformly and purposely around the entire pan,tray, or rack of food placed with in it. In traditional gas ovens, food sits on a shelf and is heated from the gas or electric heating element found below the food. What happens is that the heat rises and flows around the food and tends to not actively cook equally compared to a blowing circulating current of hot air found in convection technology. Many cooks complain of food being scorched on the bottom but not quite browned on top in traditional ovens. With convection ovens, this problem tends to dissappear because the flow of hot air is directed equally at the item being baked.
So what are some of the obvious benefits of using a halogen convection oven? Lets examine a few of the features:
Benefits of buying and cooking with a Halogen Oven
- Food will cook much faster…by some accounts up to 50% than traditional ovens.
- A Halogen Oven will use less electricity and/or natural gas to operate. This is due to not having to preheat the oven and also not having to keep it on for as long. Also the temperatures required for cooking are lower and thus also save energy.
- Usually halogen ovens are made in countertop models. This means you can keep your cooking at eye level for close inspection and monitoring.
- Halogen ovens don’t smoke or burn food.
- Food is cooked more evenly and thus better. This means food retains moisture better meaning that meat will be moist and baked goods will be browned, not burnt.
- Halogen oven lids allow quick access to the food and no loss of heat or energy is required.
- A Halogen Oven is much cooler to operate in your home, meaning that in August, it isn’t a burden to cook with it like it might be to cook with your traditional gas oven.
- Small form factor of halogen convection ovens allow incredible portability which allows you to literally take these anywhere. Try doing that with your regular stove!
- A convection oven with halogen heating is small and thus also easier and more convenient to clean up. Easy cooking, easy cleanup. It doesn’t get better than that!
So what are some real world numbers for cooking with convection ovens vs. traditional ovens? A recent cooking magazine did a “sample” test by baking some cookies in both their halogen convection oven as well as in their natural gas oven. What they found is that with the halogen oven, they were able to bake 3 trays of cookies for slightly less than the recipe’s stated time at 25 degrees less than what was required. In the regular oven, they also attempted to bake 3 trays of cookies, but what they found was that the cookies on the bottom rack of the oven were cooking much too fast and ended up burning while the ones located on the top rack had barely started to bake. This goes back to the fact that in a regular oven, the heating element is located on the bottom of the oven and the heat radiates from that point. In the convection oven, the halogen element was providing the heat source, while the circulating fans controlled the air flow properly to ensure that the cookies were baking evenly.
We personally love this relatively new technology and wish someone had made these types of ovens available to the consumer market long ago. In any case, do a little bit of digging online to find the right models of convection oven that might fit your home and kitchen.
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