Combi oven or convection oven – which one should you choose?
A convection oven and a combi oven may look similar at first glance, but in practice, they are designed for quite different needs. A traditional convection oven is a relatively simple oven based on hot air, while a modern combi oven combines hot air, steam, humidity control, and typically much more intelligent control.
Which type you should choose therefore depends not only on what you want to cook. It is also about who will be operating the oven, how varied the production is, and how much work the oven should be able to take over from the staff.
When is a convection oven the right choice?
We typically recommend a convection oven for kitchens with relatively simple and uniform tasks. This could, for example, be a café or a community center where the oven is primarily used for baking and simpler dishes.
A traditional manual convection oven can be a particularly good choice if the same experienced person always operates the oven. Temperature, time, and potential steam injection must be managed to a greater extent by the user, and therefore experience matters more than with a modern automatic combi oven.
Naturally, there are also advanced convection ovens with digital control. The difference between the oven types is therefore not just a question of buttons or touchscreen, but of which cooking options and automatic functions the oven has.
When does a combi oven make more sense?
A combi oven really comes into its own in a kitchen with many different cooking tasks. This could be a restaurant, canteen, hotel, or catering kitchen where the oven, for example, needs to roast meat in the morning, steam potatoes or rice later, and regenerate finished dishes before serving.
Here, the kitchen's standard cooking procedures can be saved as programs, so the employee does not have to set up the oven from scratch every time.
On intelligent combi ovens, the oven can also automatically adjust parts of the cooking process based on, among other things, the load and conditions in the oven chamber. This makes it easier to achieve the same result, even if it is not the same employee standing at the oven every day.
Steam is an important difference – but not the only one
The most well-known difference is the ability to work actively with steam and humidity. This opens up for cooking methods such as steaming potatoes and rice, regeneration, long-term roasting, and a wide range of baking and meat preparation methods.
On more advanced combi ovens, it is not just about adding steam. The oven can also measure and control the humidity in the oven chamber and remove excess moisture when necessary.
This provides much greater control over the cooking process. If a product needs to be juicy, moisture can be retained or added. If the surface needs to be crispy, moisture can be drawn out of the oven chamber.
A combi oven can be easier for inexperienced staff
It might seem obvious that the simple convection oven is also the easiest to use. That is not necessarily the case.
For an experienced chef, a manual convection oven can be very simple: set the temperature and time and adjust based on experience.
For an employee without that experience, an intelligent combi oven can actually be easier. Many modern combi ovens have pre-set automatic programs, and the kitchen's own recipes can be saved once they have been established.
Thereafter, in many cases, the employee can simply select the desired recipe on the display and start the program. This makes the result less dependent on who is in the kitchen that particular day.
Automatic cleaning is a bigger difference than many expect
One of the biggest practical differences in daily life is, in our experience, the cleaning.
Many traditional convection ovens must be cleaned manually. It takes time, and in practice, it is difficult to get the entire oven chamber as thoroughly clean as with an automatic cleaning program.
A combi oven with automatic cleaning, on the other hand, can run a complete cleaning program after production. This can save many labor hours over the life of the oven and makes it significantly easier to keep the oven clean – especially in kitchens where fatty products are prepared every day.
Can a combi oven also cook faster?
It can in some situations. An advanced combi oven can control, among other things, air circulation, temperature, steam, and humidity much more precisely than a traditional convection oven.
In our own tests with customers, we have experienced up to about 20% shorter cooking times for certain dishes. It is not a fixed saving that you can count on for all products, but it shows that the choice of oven can also affect the kitchen's capacity – not just the result itself.
Is the convection oven much cheaper?
Not necessarily. Within premium ovens, the price difference between a good convection oven and a combi oven is often smaller than customers expect.
Therefore, we rarely find that price alone dictates the choice. Customers who specifically want a traditional convection oven do so more often because they want a simple, manual oven and prefer to avoid digital operation.
If the lowest possible purchase price is the most important factor, there are, conversely, simple convection ovens from cheaper manufacturers.
Which oven should you choose?
We normally start with two questions:
- What will you be cooking?
- Who will be operating the oven?
If the oven is primarily to be used for baking or solving a few simple tasks, and it is operated by people with experience, a convection oven may be the right and simplest solution.
If the oven, on the other hand, is to be used for many different dishes, steaming, long-term roasting, regeneration, or other more advanced cooking methods, we would normally look toward a combi oven. The same applies if many different employees need to be able to achieve a consistent result without necessarily being trained chefs.
The most important thing is therefore not to choose the oven with the most functions, but the oven that fits the way the kitchen actually works.
