You’ll be hard-pressed to find a more popular appliance than the convection oven among baking enthusiasts. With its fast pre-heating and energy-efficient functions, it allows you to whip up anything your heart desires in a relatively short time.
While a convection oven isn’t normally known for its versatility, there’s actually an assortment of pots and pans that you can use with it. This includes aluminum foil pans.
Aluminum Foil Pans for Convection
Yes, you can use aluminum pans in a convection oven. They’re even more ideal for these types of ovens because of their low-rimmed structure that allows hot air to circulate quickly and more evenly.
There are all sorts of food items you can cook in a disposable aluminum pan in your convection oven. Among these are pizzas, which fit perfectly in most traditional convection ovens when placed in aluminum foil pans meant for pizzas.
Cake sizes don’t have to be uniform to bake well in an aluminum foil pan. Plus, you can cook cakes of different sizes simultaneously using a convection oven. That’s because the appliance evenly disperses heat around the food, making it almost impossible to undercook cakes.
Still, you want to be extra careful when using anodized aluminum pans. These pans are composed of dark metal, which can hasten the browning of your food in a convection oven. Keep a close watch on your food if you’re cooking it with this pan.
Aluminum Pans You Can Use With Convection
In a convection oven, hot air circulates around food so that it cooks faster and more evenly. This is all thanks to a fan built on the appliance’s rear end.
Convection ovens don’t normally require special pans. For the most part, pans used in a conventional oven will also work on them.
So, let’s take a look at the pans you can use to cook with convection.
1. Baking Pans
Metal baking pans that are light-colored or made of aluminum work well with convection ovens. Sure, anodized pans are also useful, but if you don’t keep a close eye on your food, you might end up with an over-browned finished product.
Flat, thin aluminum pans are perfect for baking pizzas and biscuits via convection. You can even bake multiple batches in one go since racks can be placed close together in a convection oven.
Basically, if your culinary creations have the same temperature specifications, then you can cook several sheets of them at once in a convection oven. Just make sure the aluminum pans are placed at the center of each rack.
The aluminum loaf pan is ideal if you’re looking to bake a loaf of bread. If muffins are your thing, you can bake delectable batches using the basic aluminum muffin pans.
Specialty muffins pans are also available for convection ovens. They’re shallower and have bins spaced farther apart for more even cooking.
2. Roasting Pans
Roasting fish, meat, and vegetable brings out delicious juices that you’ll want to keep contained using a v-shaped aluminum rack. This rack should be positioned on top of the aluminum roasting pan, so none of the juices spill.
Food should also be placed at the center of the rack so that hot air can circulate on all sides. This allows it to cook quicker and more evenly.
Additionally, since convection cooking sears food on the outside fits, there’s no need to pan-sear before cooking in the oven. In some models, you can use the “true” convection setting for this.
3. Broiling Pans
A double-tiered pan is ideal for broiling food in the convection oven. This pan channels fat from the topmost portion of the pan down to the bottom to eliminate any possibility of grease fires.
If the food you’re broiling is low in fat, use the heavier sheet pans since thin ones are prone to collapsing under intense heat. They can also cause your food to burn, which is the last thing you want.
Now that it’s established that aluminum foil pans can be used with convection, let’s find out if merely placing a foil over regular pans is okay. InductionPros recommends using the best-rated convection toaster and microwave ovens on the market to ensure the best possible results in this area.
Aluminum Foil for Convection
Convection ovens come in different versions. There are even convection-microwave hybrid options available in the market. While you should be good at using aluminum foil for cooking with convection, you shouldn’t wrap the foil around the food for microwaving. That is because aluminum blocks the waves from reaching the dish, leaving it undercooked.
Where microwaving is concerned, aluminum foil is also a fire hazard. It can result in the overheating of the microwave convection oven, which might deform the electric arcs in your appliance.
Of course, if you insist on using aluminum foil when cooking with convection, keep in mind the following guidelines:
- Aluminum foil should only be used to cover portions of the food you don’t want overcooked.
- Aside from using only a small amount of foil, make sure it’s pressed close to the food item before cooking.
- No part of the foil should be sticking away from the food since this can cause it to function as an antenna and cause arcing in your appliance.
- Never use aluminum foil to line cookware when cooking with convection. This only draws heat away from your dish, causing it to cook quickly and unevenly.
Importance of Pan Size
Whatever convection-compatible pan you use, make sure it fits easily into the oven. There has to be at least an inch of space on each side to ensure optimal outcomes.
Cook With Convection Using Aluminum
Aluminum foils can be used safely when cooking with convection. Granted, you should take extra care to use them properly when using a microwave convection oven. Aluminum foils are more of a safety issue for this type of oven than they are for others. In fact, to be completely on the safe side, you might want to avoid using aluminum foils altogether for a microwave-convection hybrid.
Still, nothing beats convection cooking using aluminum foil pans. They come in different varieties suitable for roasting, baking, and broiling food in a convection oven.
JOHn says
I have a Panasonic inverter nn ct54jw can I place a take away in tin foil on oven moued
Yummiest Food says
I’m not sure, but you should.