What to cook in a speed oven
A variety of food items can be prepared with a commercial speed oven, including foods that are pre-cooked, parbaked, frozen or fresh. Items such as pastries, sandwiches, paninis, pre-cooked meat items like chicken wings or hamburger patties, veggies, and pre-cooked pasta dishes are all well-suited for today’s professional high-speed ovens. Items that are usually associated with quick serve restaurants, fast food, cafes and snack bars can be great for speed ovens. Imagine serving up 4 toasted sandwiches in 75 seconds or plating an order of chicken wings in less than 2 minutes. With a speed oven, you can serve your customers quickly, leading to faster output and greater profit.
However, there are some food items that require specific cooking processes that standard commercial speed ovens cannot achieve.
What are the limits of traditional speed oven?
Assuming you’re working with a wide menu, you might need to prepare dishes which require you to cook raw proteins such as meat, fish, or poultry. This is a limitation for traditional speed ovens for several reasons. Firstly, you might want to steam, such as with steamed fish, or you might require a longer cooking time, as with a raw steak.
With both examples, the grease produced from the cooking processes could become a problem and cause damage to the equipment. If your speed oven is equipped with fans, the grease from the cooking process could be circulated into those fans, causing them to malfunction. Likewise, a lot of grease and dirt accumulated within the oven chamber makes it very difficult to clean if the oven does not have an automatic washing program (many standard speed ovens do not include this feature.)
Traditional speed ovens vs. UNOX commercial speed ovens
What you can cook in a commercial speed oven may depend on the type of speed oven you’re using. For example, a traditional speed oven, which normally uses microwaves and air circulation to cook and bake foods quickly, can prepare a variety of foods like the ones already mentioned; however, they are not ideally suited for certain cooking techniques, such as steaming, or certain foods, like raw meat and proteins.
A commercial speed oven, which can combine the power of microwaves, high-speed fans, and even steam cooking, can greatly expand the food items that you’re able to cook quickly.
Thinking of buying a professional speed oven? Discover the 5 most important features to consider when buying a professional speed oven.
We at UNOX are proud to offer the best of both worlds, offering speed ovens which can meet the need of every professional kitchen, which need to prepare a wide variety of menu options while being conscious of spatial footprint and resource consumption.
With the SPEED.Pro™, foodservice operators can take advantage of high-speed cooking with powerful microwaves and switch modes to harness high-speed convection baking using air circulation and precision heating.
If you are searching for a combi speed oven, the SPEED-X™, a revolutionary combi speed oven that marries the speed of a rapid cook oven with the versatility of a combi oven, is the best choice for you. This ultimate culinary machine uses microwaves, air circulation, and steam to achieve cooking perfection, regardless of the type of food. It also cooks foods even faster than a typical speed oven, helping operators increase their production beyond what was possible before.
The SPEED-X™ is the first and only commercial speed oven equipped with a self-washing feature. It allows the operator to cook a wider variety of foods, due to its ability to be cleaned easier and faster with a program that will detect the level of dirt in the oven and suggest the appropriate cleaning cycle.