Convection Toaster Oven

Tips for Convection Toaster Oven Cooking

Switching from a conventional radiant oven to a convection toaster oven need not be an unpleasant experience of eating burnt food in the morning and raw food at night. You may have to experiment with the cooking times and temperatures of different kinds of foods. The general rule, however, is the Rule of 25s. This means that if your recipe book for cooking in a conventional oven calls for 300°F at 60-minute cooking time, you can reduce this by 25% to 225°F at 45 minutes. With this rule-of-thumb, although you may still have to do with slightly over- or undercooked food, you won’t be too far off the mark. You can fine tune this as you go along.

You can also experiment with turning the fan off either at the start, in the middle, or towards the end of your cooking. If you want to brown your roast but still want it to cook slowly, you can use the fan only at the start or end of your cooking.

Since the time and energy saved come in percentages, foods that take a long time to cook will result in greater savings. For instance, a 10-pound turkey can take as long as 2 hours to cook in a conventional oven. In a convection oven this is reduced to 1½ hours, saving you 30 minutes. Baking cookies, on the other hand will take only about 12 minutes in a radiant oven. Using a convection oven for this will only result to a savings of 3 minutes. Thus, if you need to cook your turkey and cookies at the same time, put the turkey in the convection oven.

Using baking pans with low sides can also help speed up cooking as these expose more of the food to the circulating hot air. If the food in the convection oven needs to be covered with foil or parchment, weigh them down with spoon or fork to keep them from getting blown around.