Ojakangas - Cooking with convection: featuring more than 150 recipes

A couple of years ago I was asked to present a seminar on convection oven cooking. Curious, I asked how I happened to be selected for this project. The answer was because I had written a cookbook on countertop convection oven cooking in 1980. It surprised me that there was nothing newer on the market.

I did my own search and found that no book has been published specifically for standardsized convection ovens. All I could find were books written for countertop convection ovens, one of them my own. Of course, I said yes to the seminar. I was eager to explore the advantages of baking and roasting in the convection oven.

Years ago, a colleague of mine told me, You don't think you're cooking unless there is an oven involved. I come from a long line of home bakers. My Finnish grandmothers baked in the ovens of wood-fired hearths of rural Finland, in the same style as their mothers and grandmothers. In fact, the first baking I ever did was in the oven of a woodstove. When our first electric range was installed (I was about ten years old), I couldn't keep my hands off itI thought it was magical.

There was not another significant breakthrough in cooking technology until the convection oven began to be used in commercial kitchens in the 1960s. In the years following my convection oven cookbook, I graduated from countertop models to standard-sized convection ovens and now have three different 30-inch units in my kitchen.

In a convection oven, foods generally cook and brown evenly in considerably less time than in a conventional oven, and at a lower temperature, while retaining juiciness and flavor. Like the surround sound of modern music systems, convection ovens produce surround heat. A fan intensifies the heat by circulating it around the food.

Over the years, I've often spent eight to ten hours a day in the kitchen developing and testing recipes for breads, cakes, pies, cookies, pastries, and fancy desserts, and although I've baked all day and the kitchen counter is piled with goodies, at dinnertime there still may be nothing to eat!

What do I do? Rather than resort to take-out or convenience meals, I usually turn up the heat in the convection oven and hot roast a quick meal in twenty minutes or less. A variety of roasted fresh vegetables can make a healthy, flavorful meatless meal, or I can choose to add poultry, meat, or fish for a low-fat meal. The variety and selection of ingredients for these meals depends largely on the season, how recently I've been grocery shopping, and what happens to be in the refrigerator at the time. In the winter it might be quickly roasted root vegetables, whereas in the summer it might be roasted ratatouille or other vegetables from the garden.

Much as I love outdoor grilling, in our northern climate it simply isn't possible to grill outdoors all year. I've turned to oven-grilling chicken, chops, steaks, and vegetables, adapting my favorites and using the marinades and bastes we've come to love for the outdoor grill. To make the grill marks I preheat a cast-iron grill pan right along with the oven and oven-grill everything from hamburgers to chicken breasts to fresh vegetables in minutes. Grill pans are widely available in the cookware sections in many superstores, supermarkets, and department stores across the country. Some are flat with a pancake griddle on one side and a ridged grill on the other. Some look like a cast-iron frying pan with ridges across the bottom. Either style works well.

Quickly roasted meals, however, do not tell the whole story about convection oven cooking. I also bake crusty, rustic bread or French baguettes; moist and tender cakes; and all our favorite pies and cookies. Beef, pork, and lamb roasts; turkey and whole chickens; even a whole salmon will cook in a third to half the time of a regular oven. Quiches, gratins, casseroles, and even souffls turn out perfectly.