Choosing your main oven

“Help” you say.  “I need to choose an oven and there are SO many choices!”  This is a familiar saying when people are forced to making a decision on what sort of oven they should buy for their new kitchen.  The kitchen designer or kitchen company have already been, you are committed to going ahead with this but you need to decide on the appliances by next week before they come for the final check measure.  Sound familiar?

Basically people doing a new kitchen fall into one of four categories:-

1. The ‘foodie’ who loves to cook and will probably live in the property for a long time.
2. The ‘family’ who don’t really care about cooking, they do it because they need to but want something decent to last.
3. The ‘renovator’ who is doing the property either for a quick sale or as a first timer on their first renovation with a limited budget.
4. The ’empty nester’ or ‘downsizer’ who now has the chance to get what they really want after all these years.

As I have mentioned before in the steam oven article a good salesperson should ask you if you like cooking very early on in the discussion.  In my opinion this is the most important piece of information that they can know.  It tells them what to recommend to you.  If you like to cook  you have certain requirements and expectations of an appliance.  This isn’t as complicated as it sounds – it just means you expect your thermostat to be accurate, the oven to brown evenly from one side to the other and you expect that the quality is going to last for a long time.  These people would fall into Category 1 or 4 above.

Unless they are vegetarian, people in these two categories probably also don’t like cleaning and may roast meat.  I would recommend they buy what is called a Pyrolitic oven.  Otherwise known as a true self-cleaning oven.  This type of oven will heat to 500°C and burn off any fat in a program that lasts approximately 2-3 hours.  Easily done overnight.  The door of the oven will lock so it cannot be opened during the cleaning process and once cool enough the charred remains or ‘dust’ on the bottom and sides of the oven can simply be wiped out with a wet sponge.  “Does it really clean?” you ask – yes it does!  Pyro ovens as we call them have been around for a long time, have up to 4 layers of glass so they are quite cool to touch and are the oven of choice for most people who roast and grill a lot of meat.  Nobody likes cleaning – if you roast once a week and grill meat at least once a week you need to buy a pyro oven!

Let’s look at the people in Category 2.  They probably roast once a week and grill most nights with a family so I would suggest a pyro for them as well.  Only problem here is they are a bit more expensive and often a family needs more than one oven.  A double oven or a large, full size oven and a smaller or half oven is the best for a growing family.  If cost isn’t an issue then a Pyro oven as the main oven and a smaller combi oven would be the ultimate.  See my article on choosing a combi.   A combi can either be a combi-steam oven or a combi-microwave oven.  The combi-microwave is probably the most popular for a family but I personally prefer the combi-steam oven as mentioned in my previous article.  If your family doesn’t want to invest in a Pyro oven and would prefer the typical double oven then it will probably have catalytic liners on the sides that will help protect the oven from getting fatty but you still need to clean this type of oven.  The liners cannot be scrubbed or sprayed with oven cleaner but if you look after your oven it will still be a good choice for you.  As with any oven, please read your instruction manual on how to maintain it.

Now the last category – 3.  Basically these buyers want something that looks good and is cheap.  As long as it works they don’t really care what it does, what functions it has or how it cooks.  They certainly don’t care about how you clean it because they either wont be living there or don’t cook very much anyway.  It’s all about the price and usually they will jump at what we use to call a ‘builders pack’ where they could get everything for a set price, even including a sink and tap!  It was really nice to be able to offer purchasers like this such a deal.  It was a good way to buy for them and they were happy.  After all it’s all about making people happy isn’t it?  The classic win-win situation.  So my only advice to these purchasers would be to choose a recognised brand over a no-name or never heard of name.  If it’s your first property you will probably live there for a while so look carefully at what the difference is in price between the base model and perhaps one that might have conventional cooking (top and bottom elements) as well as fan forced as you may be surprised that the difference in price isn’t as much as you might think.  At least then you can turn the fan off so your mum can cook a pavlova when she visits one day!

Finally, try to buy an oven that suits the way YOU cook!  It has to last a long time and cook a lot of meals.  That is the best advice I can give you…..