Convection Oven question

Hoping this is the right forum. I have a Dacor wall oven with convection. I was deciding between this and the Wolf, and my kitchen guy said they were pretty much the same. I liked the look of the Dacor better and loved the pitch that 5 sheets of cookies would bake equally without rotating, turning etc. of the pans.

Not happnening that way. I'm finding that stuff I bake in the oven on convection (which they recommend using for just about everything) tends to cook around the edges a lot more than in the center of the pan. This is true with cookies and with a blintz casserole I made yesterday...the edges were browned while the center was barely set.

Anyone know if my oven is not working properly or if this is the way they all work and I was naive to believe the sales pitch.

How much room is there around the cookie sheet? It may be cutting off the airflow of the convection process.

Mike G wrote:How much room is there around the cookie sheet? It may be cutting off the airflow of the convection process.

I use a 30" cookie sheet purchased directly from dacor, it fills the entire rack space. (You just slide the sheet onto the indents for the racks.) With casseroles and cakes, they're usually just 9x13 sizes.

The Chow Poodle baked cookies in our new convection oven for the first time tonight. She reports that they cooked in approx 75% of the time they took in a conventional oven. They looked (and tasted) delicious. I'd agree with eatchicago on the possible problem. Make sure you are allowing enough air circulation room.

Aside from cooking, while the Dacor has more modern styling, the Wolf is imho a better constructed appliance. Case in point, several of the Dacor wall ovens are made with a space age ceramic lining which is all well and good but when they have failed the entire unit had to be replaced.

Don't get me wrong, both are fine choices, it's just that in my professional experience the Wolf has a far better reliability record.

Octarine wrote:Aside from cooking, while the Dacor has more modern styling, the Wolf is imho a better constructed appliance. Case in point, several of the Dacor wall ovens are made with a space age ceramic lining which is all well and good but when they have failed the entire unit had to be replaced.

Don't get me wrong, both are fine choices, it's just that in my professional experience the Wolf has a far better reliability record.

Well what is the OP going to do about that now?

I have a Dacor free-standing unit, with convection, and I admit that over the three good years of having it, I've used the convection cycle only once. I just don't have a handle on the cooking time adjustment for convection and it's rare that I'm roasting something that takes an inordinate amount of time. I know I have to change that the idea of fussing over something just isn't appealing . . .

While we don't have a Dacor oven we do have convection options on ours (Bosch). My wife does a lot of baking. A lot. She had a similar experience based on your description. After a little research and experimentation results were much more uniform for baked goods using the Bake option rather than Convection Bake. We use the Convection feature for many things, but baking isn't one of them. Again this is based on our oven, but it's worth a try if you aren't getting the results you expect.

I've got a least one baking (i.e., pastries, cookies and cakes) cookbook that actually list two separate cooking temperatures: one for convection ovens and one for non-convection. The temperatures for the convection ovens are almost always 75 degrees F lower than the non-convection. The only time the temperatures are the same are for very low temperature baking or very small cookies.

Your description (dark edges, cool centers) sounds to me more like too high temps than non-circulating air (which I believe would lead to some cookies getting too dark before the others finish baking). Perhaps you could lower the baking temperature by about 75 degrees next time you try the same recipe and see what happens?

(Sorry! Got a little too eager there and posted twice. Could one of our esteemed moderators be so kind as to remove the annoying double post?)

Thanks everyone for the replies. Re the temp, I always go 25 deg below recipe temp as instructed in the materials but will try going lower next time.

Re the Wolf v Dacor, BELIEVE ME, I only wish my horrible kitchen guy was more interested in WHAT he was selling me than in simply selling me something. I asked numerous times and this so-called expert said they were the same. Can you tell I'm a little bitter? LOL

Sur la Table offers a class on using a convection oven. My wife and I took it a few years ago. Makes a lot more sense now when and how to use convection.