Oven

Oven depicted in a painting by Jean-François Millet

An oven is an enclosed compartment for heating, baking or drying. It is most commonly used in cooking and pottery. Ovens used in pottery are also known as kilns. An oven used for heating or for industrial processes is called a furnace or industrial oven. In modern times the oven is used to cook and heat food in many households across the globe.

Ancient Greek portable oven, 17th century BCE

Settlements across the Indus Valley Civilization were the first to have an oven within each mud-brick house by 3200 BC.[1][2]

Culinary historians credit the Greeks for developing bread baking into an art. Front-loaded bread ovens were developed in ancient Greece. The Greeks created a wide variety of doughs, loaf shapes and styles of serving bread with other foods. Baking developed as a trade and profession as bread increasingly was prepared outside of the family home by specially trained workers to be sold to the public. This is one of the oldest forms of professional food processing.

Contents

Cooking

Modern oven

In cooking, the conventional oven is a kitchen appliance and is used for roasting and heating. Food normally cooked in this manner includes meat, casseroles and baked goods such as bread, cake and other desserts.

Modern ovens are fueled by gas or electricity. When an oven is contained in a complete stove, the fuel used for the oven may be the same as or different from the fuel used for the burners on top of the stove.

Ovens usually can use a variety of methods to cook. The most common may be to heat the oven from below. This is commonly used for baking and roasting. The oven may also be able to heat from the top to provide broiling. In order to provide faster, more-even cooking, convection ovens use a small fan to blow hot air around the cooking chamber. An oven may also provide an integrated rotisserie.

Ovens also vary in the way that they are controlled. The simplest ovens (for example, the AGA cooker) may not have any controls at all; the ovens simply run continuously at various temperatures. More conventional ovens have a simple thermostat which turns the oven on and off and selects the temperature at which it will operate. Set to the highest setting, this may also enable the broiler element. A timer may allow the oven to be turned on and off automatically at pre-set times. More sophisticated ovens may have complex, computer-based controls allowing a wide variety of operating modes and special features including the use of a temperature probe to automatically shut the oven off when the food is completely cooked to the desired degree.

Some ovens provide various aids to cleaning. Continuous cleaning ovens have the oven chamber coated with a catalytic surface that helps break down (oxidize) food splatters and spills over time. Self-cleaning ovens use pyrolytic decomposition (extreme heat) to oxidize dirt. Steam ovens may provide a wet-soak cycle to loosen dirt, allowing easier manual removal. In the absence of any special methods, chemical oven cleaners are sometimes used or just old-fashioned scrubbing.

Industrial, scientific, and artisanal use

Outside the culinary world, ovens are used for a number of purposes.

See also

Classical Pompeii oven

References

  1. ↑ History of THE INDUS CIVILIZATION
  2. ↑ Dales, George (1974), "Excavations at Balakot, Pakistan, 1973", Journal of Field Archaeology (Boston University) 1 (1-2): 3–22 [10], doi:10.2307/529703, http://jstor.org/stable/529703 

External links