We're planning out a kitchen for a new house, and trying to figure out what double ovens to get. In our current house, we have a GE Profile double (with one convection oven). It's a good oven - bakes and roasts fairly well.

Since Miele and Wolf both have centers in our area, we went to each try both baking and roasting. We cooked a chicken, roasted vegetables (asparagus, potatoes), and baked some Trader Joe's frozen dough chocolate chip cookies (easier than whipping up a mix on the spot). All of these things we've obviously baked at home many times.

Miele: Outstanding roasting for both the chicken (using the rotisserie) and the vegetables - noticeably better than the Profile. The cookies, however, came out pancake-flat (though they were all baked very evenly). The dough had somewhat defrosted prior to baking, but that outcome was still surprising.

Wolf: Roasting was a failure. The oven was allegedly out of adjustment, but the chicken didn't brown very much, and the vegetables were soggy. Baking was okay (using a different oven) - a little more uneven than the GE Profile (but better than the Miele). While the roasting result might have improved after an oven repair, it raises a reliability issue that I'd rather not face (if the Wolf folks can't keep the oven at their center in working order, what hope do I have after the sale?) We have thus ruled out the Wolf.

Given the amount of money at stake, we'd really like to try out all of the oven possibilities before selecting one. We returned to the Miele center with another batch of cookies, and they still came out extremely flat. We really wanted to like the Miele because of the roasting, but we have significant concerns for baking. The person working at the Miele center also told us that "brownies out of a box" also don't seem to cook right in the Miele. It appears that the oven is quite sensitive to the particular recipe being baked.

Based on the review at the site:

www.appliance.com/cooking/editorial.php?article=1711&zone=1109&first=1

we thought we should consider the Dacor ovens as well.

The recent Consumer Reports suggests that the Electrolux Icon double oven is also a good choice.

And, if all else fails, the default choice is to get the GE Monogram, since we assume that the performance of that is no worse than the performance of our GE Profile.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that we can go try out any of the Dacor, Electrolux, or Monogram in the greater Boston area (unless anyone knows where that would be).

Cost and appearance is very secondary to performance - given the above, what ovens should we choose?

P.S. In case anyone is curious, we also tried the Wolf rangetop - while it's certainly a lot more attractive than the GE Profile, performance was fairly similar. (We're still getting the Wolf anyway, but more for aesthetics than actual cooking performance.)