25° lower is the rule of thumb. Some ovens automatically adjust, so read the manual. The only time I use it is when I'm baking multiple trays of cookies at time. Which, now that I'm thinking about it, I have yet to try with my newish oven.

You can reduce the time a little bit, but you'll have to experiment to find out by how much. I don't use convection for cookies, cakes and so on. It's brilliant for roasted veggies.

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It depends on your specific oven (Wolf should be less annoying than some). Using a combined convection and bake or broil setting while preheating will make it go faster and heat more evenly, though you have to remember to change the setting if you don't want it for the actual cook.

Do experiment. Check for spots in the oven where things don't cook evenly, even with the convection. E.g., in my nearly perfect Gaggenau, the heat reflects back from the door when the pan is centered, rack in the middle, and the contents are fairly flat, letting the heat from the fan blow right across, heating once, and rebound from the door right onto the food to heat that corner again. It's a very small subset of otherwise very even convection cooking. Each oven is different and has its own quirks.

ANY new oven will be different, and times you know by heart, times in recipes, may now be wrong. Set timers for early, and check. Sometimes you’ll want a shorter cook time than before, other times a different temperature works well (the 25 degree thing isn't as likely to apply to a new Wolf as to other and older ovens, but it might…or 5 degrees might be your number, or no change at all).

Eggs and other delicate rises don't always like convection. Like soufflés. Not good. OTOH, many makers don't bother engineering their ovens to heat evenly, using convection as a crutch to do the work for them. Wolf's ovens have a good repurptation, though, and for the price one does expect better. Which goes back to learning what works for your food in your oven. Give yourself time and grace to learn the new range. Start with more forgiving things, Keep a closer watch than normal, until you know what it'll do. And have fun! Experiment! Add some hugs (while it's cool). Congratulations on your new friend!

I do bake bread every weekend, so I guess that's as good a place to start as any, since I'm familiar with the recipes and what they should be like. Roasted vegetables, too -- those are hard to screw up too badly.

Um… Maybe try the bread without convection first. ;)

^^^Agreed. I’d get accustomed to the normal bake mode before playing around.

”many makers don't bother engineering their ovens to heat evenly, using convection as a crutch to do the work for them”

plllog - If you’ll recall, I asked about the convection fan coming on intermittently in regular bake mode, in my new ovens. I suspect you’re right, as to the reason. I will say it seems to work as my cookies come out virtualky perfectly evenly without turning the trays.

Oh! A thought. If you're baking your bread in a cast iron pot or a heavy ceramic or terracotta covered baker, it'll be protected, and should do very well with the even heat from convection. If it's a beautiful rise sitting proud on a sheet pan, it'll probably be happier without convection, at least until you're confident in how your new oven behaves.

I've used different brands of convection and MY Wolf has a double fan in the back. I've also worked in a commercial bakery. ALL convection does, is distribute heat evenly between oven racks. If you want to cook multiple racks of cookies and have them ALL come out of the oven at the same time...instead of cooking them in multiple batches......that's what convection does.

If I bake a chicken in a covered dutch oven for instance...it seems to make NO difference at all in the cooking time or temperature in my Wolf oven. But...my Wolf oven also has a fan that runs every time the oven is in use.

The GE gas oven is where I notice the biggest difference. Then I reduce the temp by 25 degrees....then I preheat with the convection on.

You'll notice if you have a single fan in the rear of your oven....? the front corners of a sheet full of cookies cook faster than the rear outside corners.

That's a simplified explanation. It does vary depending on gas or if another fan is running or if your oven has two fans in the rear instead on one.

We were once on a visit at the house of friends who live abroad (indeed, they're in their home country).

They'd asked us in advance if we could prepare an "American Thanksgiving meal" and we welcomed the opportunity. We sent over a shopping list of things for them to procure in advance.

On the appointed day, one of my assigned tasks was to cook the turkey. Converting the Fahrenheit temperature to C degrees was easy enough, I thought. I prepared the turkey and put it in and set a timer. Our friends offered no particular advice regarding using their oven.

My method of cooking anything is to start checking it when I know it's still underdone and then monitor it as it creeps up to the doneness point, rather than waiting until the timer says it should be done. This way I don't risk overcooking whatever the item is. And I never leave anything cooking unattended.

Anyway, at what was about the 3/4 point, I started smelling the odor of not "cooking turkey" but instead "cooked turkey". I opened the oven door and there staring at me was a very bronzed but not burned turkey. I pulled it out quickly. It turned out while it was a bit more done than I prefer, it wasn't dried out and all was fine.

While waiting for it to rest, one of our hosts walked up and I suggested that the time schedule for the meal was accelerated because it cooked faster than expected. The response was something along the lines of "Oh sorry, I think I forgot to mention that the oven seems to run hotter than the temperature setting, and the convection feature speeds up cooking as well".

Yes, it did run hot, and the convection feature was always on - there was no setting on the panel to turn it off or on.

Our ovens have convection features. I never use them and never will. My experiences with oven as related to timing and cooking work fine with conventional heat and I don't need to do it differently. I don't bake so maybe with baked items rather than with what I use an oven for, convection is useful.

I use mine strictly for gourmet cuisine requiring expert preparation. Dishes like frozen pizza, onion rings and tater tots to get a crispy coating and our favorite, browned cheese on the frozen pizzas. Ain't nothing but a big air fryer.

I did have a big $3K laboratory convection oven a business gave me and used it to make tomato paste for a few years. I did throw two Turkeys in it once with the fan blowing in the cavities and I had perfect turkeys inside and out. It's just dry heat blowing around and also good for powder coating small metal parts, curing rubbers, and dehydrating foods. It should have a dehydration button and when used the fan will run.

Well I baked Valentine’s cookies today, so I decided to try convection. Following mfr instructions I set the temp down 25° and put the racks at the prescribed heights. Two trays at a time, no turning or switching height, all the cookies looked the same to me. Front and back, up and down. Would they have come out differently without convection? No idea. I should have thought to try.

Convection evens out the temperature throughout the oven cavity, which is why it makes multiple levels of cookies and other small things work so well. Congrats FOAS on your holiday cookies!!

We use ours when baking multiple trays at once as it heats the food more evenly. Typically with ours, we lower temp 25° and still baking may take less time. However I fid convection takes much longer to preheat, so what I do is preheat on regular bake and then switch over to convection for a few minutes.

We find you can also use it sort of like an air fryer. If I'm baking something like breaded fish or chicken, I'll put the food on a wired rack on top of a cookie sheet to elevate it and bake it on convection and I seem to get a crispier coating.

I did pizza tonight in my Ninja airfryer/toaster oven. 11" height allows two racks to fit a quartered 16" Walmart fresh base with piled on more cheeses, pickled caramelized tomatoes and onions with precooked carrots. Came out fine equally cooked because of the fan velocity and cavity size. Everything cooks fast and easy in this oven. You develop the correct time and temp as you use your oven. Check as you cook and keep a record.

Ordinary cook with an ordinary range here. My 12 year old Bosch dual fuel has a convection oven setting that automatically lowers the cooking temperature by 25 degrees when using the convection mode. I find food cooks quite a bit faster. Great for roasting and reheating. Haven't tried it for baking.

I've never used one, I don't have a clue as to what they are. My toaster oven had one, but I didn't know what to do with it. Anyone have an easy lesson?

Joann, if you don't have it, you don't need it. Convection is what happens when the heat in one room meets the cool in another and the two affecting each makes a breeze. There are some fancy ovens that are shaped so this effect happens passively. The result is that the temperature throughout the oven is even, and doesn't have hot or cool spots, like for FOAS’s cookies up topic. He remarked on how they baked evenly on multiple levels without turning the pans midway. In his case, and what we're generally talking about in this topic, the effect is created by a special fan in the oven. The ”good kind”, sometimes called ”real”, has a heating element in the fan zone which brings up to the set temperature the air coming in from the oven cavity (i.e., where the racks are and cooking happens). That way it's not just a breeze cooling your oven and drying out your food. It's also the source of some ovens being hotter/faster with convection.

There's usually a single sensor that tells the oven how warm it is. The temperature away from the sensor may be different. Additionally, some very expensive ovens have a temperature drift range less than 10 degrees either side of the set point, while more commonly, many ovens which are considered quite good, have a drift of 25 degrees either side of the set point. When the oven senses it's significantly cooler than the setting, it puts more heating power on, until it recovers the correct temperature, or goes over. The heated air of convection helps bring the temperature closer to set, while mixing it all up and making it cook more evenly.

Big cast iron pots cook well, and in fact are called ”ovens”, because they're slow to change temperature and cook well and evenly. I find using convection on them improoves them even more. A large pot can create ”heat shadows” which the fan can fix. As others have mentioned, it can also speed up cooking, like for a steak on a grill plate, or a casserole. Partly, I'm sure, it's from maintaining the higher true temperature set, rather than all the cooling between heating cycles, but also because the air movement can be drying, and part of cooking uncovered is evaporation of excess moisture.

An ”air fryer” isn't a fryer at all. It's a high speed convection oven, that dries fast enough to crisp the food and mimic frying.

What to do with it is a harder lesson than what it is. The best intro is what Nicole said, and FOAS did, which is multilevel cooking of the same thing, like cookies, at the same temperature anywhere in the oven. Even there, though, there are caveats. Big professional ovens can do a full sheet on every rack. Most home ovens can't do a sheet that fills the space on every rack, and still get even results. Most are challenged at three, let alone five. Also, when the trays are too close together, there are heat reflections from the top tray, affecting the one below it and speeding it up. Each oven is different, and has its own quirks and workarounds, but those are akin to taking out the tray and reversing it when there's no convection fan. Any decent home oven should do two trays (one above middle, one below middle) of cookies with a few inches margin all around for air circulation, quite evenly, and some will do a good three, top, middle, bottom.

From there, it's a matter of experimenting. I don't use convection in really old recipes unless I think through the effects. Usually, just making it the way it was designed works just fine. I do mostly use convection for the rest though, other than delicate things like soufflé.

Update: Well, my first loaf of bread came out great! Beautiful rise. I probably should have checked on it about 5 minutes earlier, the internal temp was 205 F, but it'll be fine. I'll have to keep that in mind. This was in the regular bake mode, not convection.