May 18, 2017 - 3:43pm
When to use fan forced oven and when not to
can someone tell me when I should use fan forced oven and when I shouldn't when I'm baking bread. My understanding is fan allows the bread to bake more evenly but then you have to turn the temperature down by 20 degrees Celsius .
what other differences do the two have?
if I was to say water bath bake like a cheesecake, should I do it with or without fan?
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I can't comment on cheesecake, specifically. I mostly bake sourdough hearth breads.
My oven heats very evenly, but, if we are baking trays of cookies on different shelves, we do use "convection bake."
For bread, the big difference is that, at least in my electric convection oven, the convection settings vent moisture more. So, for the first part of the bake, when I want to preserve humidity, I use conventional bake. Then, I switch to convection bake and lower the temperature 25 dF.
I get good results, but I have never actually done a well-controlled experiment to determine whether that actually improves the product over baking without convection entirely.
My hunch is that there are very significant differences among the ovens on the market.
David
Thank you, so a fan isn't really a necessity?
The convection really helps to dry out the crust and brown the bread more evenly but I do spin the bread after 8 minutes of convection anyway.
I use the dutch oven technique to make my bread and have just moved into a new house with a new oven that has a 'fan bake' setting - ie fan-forced. Should I use this setting, or stick with the conventional bake without a fan, or will it not make any difference since I bake the bread dutch oven style (I do remove the bread from the cloche after 30 minutes for another 10 or so...)?