Blodgett ZEPHAIRE-100-G Single Deck Natural Gas Full Size Standard Depth Convection Oven with Draft Diverter - 50,000 BTU

Hi, I'm Chef Sarah Tressler, a baking applications specialist here at Blodgett ovens and today I'm going to go over cooking with your Zephaire. Before we begin, I'd like to go over a few general guidelines with you. One is always set your oven temperature 25 to 50 degrees less than you would if it was a range oven or deck. Two, preheat 25 to 50 degrees above your desired temperature to compensate for heat loss when you open the doors and load your product. Three, for all you new convection oven users, I would start checking your bake time halfway through because your cook times do vary based on the amount of loads you have in the oven. Then last but not least, the fans must be on for your ovens to be heating. So, now we're ready to cook in your Zephaire. Before we begin, I have a couple little tips for you. For a delicate product like I have here--cupcakes--I suggest that you preheat your oven 25 to 50 degrees above your desired set temperature and then you actually load your product in and shut your oven off. The reason I'm saying this is because the fan is continually running. For the delicate product, it can actually start to push it off over to the side. So, if you allow it to sit in the oven with the oven off, it'll start to set, and then you introduce the fan so that way your muffins or cupcakes will stay nice and tall. Similar suggestion for cookies, and the reason why we're going to do the load and then shut off is so your cookies can spread before they set because that fan makes those cookies set a little too fast. So, if you allow them to spread and then introduce the fan part way through, then you can give your cookies the color that you'd like. And for French fries, this is a nice hearty product, so we can actually just load this right into a preheated oven. My suggestion, though, is here I'm showing them on a fry screen and I've evenly distributed them throughout, even just lessening a little bit in the middle to try and promote a nice, even bake and really just having one layer, not overcrowding your pan. You just load that in and you're good to go! So, for roasting in your convection oven, I have a couple tips for you. One, I would take a hotel pan and fill it about halfway full of water and put it on the bottom rack of your oven. This will help reduce shrinkage. One thing to remember though is never place anything directly onto the floor or the bottom of the oven. This will restrict air flow and create an undesirable bake. For our roast, here I have a roast placed on a roasting rack within a pan so I can catch the juices and we can create gravy afterwards. So now we baked all of our products and I just want to do a quick, little recap for you. Here's those cupcakes that we did, nice and golden brown around the edges and standing upright. And that's because we compensated for the fans. So we loaded the oven in and shut it off and allowed those cupcakes to start coming up on their own, nice and gently and then introduced the fan to finish cooking them. Then, here's the sugar cookies that we did, nice and golden brown, evenly spread. They look great. And then, here's some crunch, crispy French fries and they're crunchy and crispy because we didn't overcrowd the pan and we made sure it was one, nice, even layer all the way around. I hope these tips were helpful. Thank you very much and have a great day!