Over the last few years, steam ovens have been gaining serious traction. Professional chefs and bakers have been enjoying the benefits of steam ovens for a while, but only recently have they turned up the heat in domestic kitchens.
The top dogs in the cooking industry all manufacture steam ovens. Big names such as Bosch, Miele, Café, and Thermador even offer models that can act as a regular oven, a steam oven, or a combination cooking oven, which we’ll get into more later. This shows that this isn’t merely a fad, but a kitchen trend that continues to pick up—you guessed it, steam.
In this article, we’ll explain how a steam oven works, and discuss whether your family should invest in one. Here are a few topics we’ll cover:
Domestic oven technology has been evolving over the last 25 years. The French brand De Dietrich is recognized as the first to introduce steam oven technology to the home in 1997, with Gaggenau raising the stakes with the first plumbed version in 1999.
There have been a lot of advancements over the last two decades in the steam oven sector. Now there are more innovative ways to use your oven than ever before, along with a powerful punch of benefits to boot.
To understand how a steam oven works, let’s take a quick look at how a conventional oven operates.
A conventional oven uses two heating elements that warm up the air inside the cavity. The bottom element is the main source of heat. The top element supplies intense heat downwards and is typically used for browning or broiling your dishes. Convection ovens circulate the air inside the oven and are often an option for most conventional ovens these days.
A steam oven, on the other hand, uses hot steam to cook instead of hot air. They may look like your typical wall oven, but they add steam into the oven house to facilitate cooking. While your traditional conventional oven uses those heating elements to warm up your food, a steam oven raises the temperature of water to a piping hot 212 degrees and injects the warm, wet heat into the oven house.
A quick science lesson for you: Air is a decent conductor of heat, but water is a far better contender. When you slip into a hot tub, which is usually a toasty 102 degrees or so, you may wince as you slowly creep in. If you’ve ever experienced a hot day in Arizona, 102 feels warm, but it doesn’t seem as jarring as stepping into bubbling water.
Speaking of water, a steam oven couldn’t exist without it since water is used to produce the steam that cooks within the oven. Steam ovens are either plumbed with water or have a tank reservoir that accesses the water to heat and steam the oven’s cavity.
By far, the most attractive benefit of a steam oven is its ability to preserve nutrients. As a society, we have realized the importance of healthy diets and are all on our way to making better decisions regarding our health and nutrition. Steam ovens are masters of nutrient preservation, and they produce more nutrient-packed food than other methods of cooking.
As food cooks, it loses moisture over time. When you cook using a steam oven, the moisture is reintroduced, which makes your food more tender, more nutrient-dense, and results in juicier bites. Since moist steam is used to cook your food, you can forgo all the oils you used to use. All of these factors also reduce the cooking time, which is always a nice bonus.
Cutting down on cooking time is a plus for everyone, especially the “hangry” person in the room. Even meals that typically require a slow-cook method like ribs can be tackled by a steam oven. You can set it at a lower temperature, and it will still beat a regular oven by hours. Smokers can take 8-10 hours. The latest steam tech allows you to get better results in less time, at the same low temperature.
The ways you can use a steam oven could also fall under the benefits column.
Using strictly the steaming function, you can do all the things you’d typically do in a steam basket, although much faster and far more efficiently. You can do things like:
Think about it like this: anything you cook on your stovetop with a pot of water, you can now cook in your steam oven. When you boil your food in water on top of the stove, you can lose up to 50% of the nutrients. When you cook that same food in a steam oven, you retain far more nutrients, which is another win for the family.
Are you someone who likes to cook multiple things at the same time? A major plus of cooking with a steam oven is that you can cook multiple dishes at once, without inadvertently transferring flavors from one thing to another.
Reheating food is a dream with a steam oven. No more soggy reheats in the microwave with the odd distribution of heat throughout your food. Using a steam oven for your leftovers revives your food, and it will taste as good—if not better—than the day before.
If you’re a bagel person, you can pop a frozen bagel into the steam oven and have it come out as if you picked it up straight from a bakery. You can even bake bread in a steam oven!
Need to defrost meat? Steam ovens can do that for you faster and safer than previous methods. If you’re entertaining, steam oven to the rescue for keeping your food warm while you mingle.
Another cool way to use the steam function is for sanitation. You can sanitize your baby bottles, jars, and cans, if you’re into canning foods.
There are a ton of benefits to using a steam oven, but if you’re wanting to cook longer roasts and meals that require a higher heat situation, you may want to consider a combination oven.
The latest models, which are very popular and allow homeowners to get the best of both worlds, offer a combo of steam and convection baking. So you can opt for dry heat like in traditional ovens, wet heat, or a combination of both.
Our clients rave about the Café Stainless Steel Steam Oven that combines convection baking, broiling, or roasting with steam cooking.
It’s important to leave the door cracked open after use so the steam oven can dry out. Once the oven has cooled down, be sure to wipe it down—ideally after each use. You don’t want to let condensation in the oven house get too comfortable; otherwise, it can be more difficult to clean later.
Because of the water element, you’ll have to descale your oven’s reservoir from time to time or remove it regularly and wash it out, to prevent limescale. Treat that step like you would a coffee maker. Some brands offer descaling tablets to simplify this step for you, but you’ll have to check the manual of your steam oven to confirm.
It boils down to which model you get, but as a general rule, be sure to wipe and dry your steam oven after every use to keep it in optimal condition.
Like with a lot of kitchen appliances, there is a wide range of options to choose from. The cost of a steam oven depends on the brand, size, and features of your oven. Countertop steam ovens range from $400 to $800. Full-size combi-steam ovens from top brands like Bosch or Miele can range from $1,500 to $8,000.
Your particular cooking style and what bells and whistles you want your oven to have will determine the cost of your kitchen upgrade.
When determining if you need a steam oven, consider your lifestyle, cooking preferences, and budget. If you are trying to make a conscious effort to take on a healthier lifestyle by maintaining the integrity of your healthy food choices, then the nutritional benefits alone produce a strong argument in favor of opting for a steam oven.
At Atherton Appliance & Kitchens, we offer a wide selection of steam ovens that are suited for any budget and enthusiastic chef in your kitchen. Our Constant Care Services go to great lengths to execute the best delivery practices in the industry. Feel free to reach out to us anytime if you have questions or need any guidance on your next kitchen appliance purchase.