What is a commercial combi oven?

A commercial combi oven is a versatile “combination” kitchen appliance that provides three cooking modes in one unit: convection, steam, or a combination of both. With convection, the oven circulates hot air to cook food faster and more evenly than the radiant heat used in a traditional oven, making it an excellent choice for baking, roasting, and browning.

In steam mode, circulating hot water vapor cooks food, which helps retain moisture, nutrients, and flavor, especially in delicate foods like vegetables or fish. Combination mode uses both hot air convection and steam together. This provides precise control over temperature and humidity, creating food that's crispy on the outside and moist on the inside.

 Combi ovens are popular in professional kitchens because they offer flexibility, efficiency, and consistent results across a wide range of cooking tasks.

What is a combi oven used for?

The three cooking modes of a combi oven — convection, steam, and a combination of both — make it ideal for various cooking techniques, such as baking, roasting, steaming, grilling, broiling, reheating, sous-vide cooking, and simultaneously cooking different dishes at the same time. 

What is a combi steam oven?

A combi steam oven is another name for a commercial combi oven. This name variation calls out steam, which is one of its three cooking modes. The other two modes are convection and a combination of both steam and convection.

What are the ideal characteristics of commercial combi ovens?

Unox commercial combi ovens are available as either electric or gas-powered and have the technology to cook any recipe easily and automatically. This includes sous-vide cooking, steam cooking, dehydrating, gratinating, browning, low and high-temperature roasting, braising, frying, regeneration, and baking. A durable Unox steam combination oven can keep on operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. 

The best commercial combi ovens ensure consistent results every day on every tray. 

In a restaurant or bakery, the success of your foods depends on combi cookers that ensure even cooking — both vertically and horizontally. With vertical uniformity, you’ll see the same even development and color from the first tray at the top to the last tray at the bottom. With horizontal uniformity, all of the products on the surface of each tray are cooked and developed in the same way, without areas or portions of food becoming more browned than others. 

UNOX commercial combi ovens from MIND.Maps™ and Digital.ID™ lines not only ensure horizontal and vertical uniformity, but they also come with ADAPTIVE.Cooking™ technology, exclusive to Unox. This allows intelligent algorithms to determine desired cooking results and automatically adjust the cooking program based on the quantity of food loaded.

The best professional combi ovens optimize energy consumption.

As the company with the highest number of ENERGY STAR® certified commercial ovens, UNOX uses advanced technology to minimize its environmental impact. Our commercial combi ovens for restaurants, pastry shops, and bakeries use SMART.Energy to automate savings and reduce water, energy, and gas consumption.

Combi ovens that are connected and intelligent.

A good industrial combi oven should be able to recognize the critical aspects of each cooking process, such as how long the door was left open during loading, how many trays of product were loaded compared to the last cooking cycle, and the best cycle for cleaning the dirt accumulated inside the cooking chamber.

UNOX commercial combi ovens do all of this and more, taking interaction with the chef to a whole new level. With CHEFTOP-X™ and BAKERTOP-X™ ovens, for example, chefs can speak commands through the HEY.Unox voice recognition system. The ovens learn from the chef's advice and become a more useful part of the kitchen flow.

And with DATA DRIVEN COOKING (DDC) technology, you can measure cooking or overall oven usage performance to help each of your chefs set improvement goals.