What Foods Can Be Cooked in a Conveyor Oven?

A conveyor oven is a long oven with a chain-driven conveyor belt inside. The food is placed at one end of the conveyor belt and is carried along inside the oven until it reaches the other end. Foods that are cooked to a certain amount of time and foods that do not need tending while baking are ideal for conveyor belt cooking.

Whether round or square, thin crust or deep dish, pizza is the classic food to cook in a conveyor oven. Cooking pizza in a conveyor eliminates labor, as spinning the pie with a peel is eliminated. With no hot spots, bubbles in the crust are almost eliminated. The pizza is set in the oven opening and forgotten about until it is taken out and cut.

Bread sticks are a natural offshoot of the pizza business and enjoy the same advantages to conveyor oven cooking. Bread sticks can be plain or covered in cheese. More elaborate sticks can be covered in pepperoni or vegetables before the cheese is added. Plain bread sticks can be turned into dessert with the addition of butter and cinnamon sugar at the end of baking.

Pies with savory fillings are popular in many ethnic cuisines, and they all benefit from cooking in a conveyor oven. There are no hot spots to deal with, so cooking is even and raw dough is not an issue to worry about. Place the pies on screens to take advantage of cooking on all sides, and they will brown on the bottom as well as the top. Cutting small slits in the top surface will help to eliminate blow-outs in the seams from steaming.

As many a creative chef has found out, Christmas cookies bake perfectly in a conveyor oven. Cookies of all type do well in the surrounded heat environment, and the fact that they are removed from the oven automatically eliminates any chance of a pan of cookies burning in the oven. Large batches can be made at once, taking advantage of the large space in the oven and enough space to use very large baking sheets.