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A regular oven without a slab of marble in the bottom makes me unhappy.

Convection ovens torque me hard enough that I'll disconnect the fan if it doesn't have a switch to turn the fan off.

Ok, a couple of questions come to mind. I am learning about baking bread, even as we speak I am in the 4 day process of trying to get some really sour sourdough going.

Marble? Is marble better than another kind of stone? I have some thick quarry stone in my ovens.

A convention oven - my oven will go either way, but I've never used the convention for baking bread. Just haven't thought about it. Why is it a bad thing?

Marble? Is marble better than another kind of stone?

LOL! I had the numbers for thermal transfer for marble handy, a piece of flat marble was handy, and that's what I went with. It is pretty convenient.

I did notice a tendency to break over the years. But sandstone would have been worse.

Use what you have. And I'm darn proud that you have any kind of stone in your oven.

Convection ovens. That will require a new post.

/johnny

I may have to copy this to a file and save it. It's a rant, for sure...

Convection ovens operate on the mistaken theory that you can put a cheap @$$ fan in the corner of an oven and create even circulation to balance out the normal hot/cold spots that cause uneven cooking.

BULL$&!T.

What the stupid little fan does is to concentrate the hot spots and cold spots and increase uneven cooking.

In a commercial bakery, it can lead to hilarity, when cooking some paper thin cookies like Pecan Thins that are mostly egg white.

What happens is that they lift off of the Silpat baking mat and fly out the back top of the oven where the vent is.

In every kitchen I ever worked in, if there was a switch to turn the fan off, I turned it off, taped over it with HAZARD tape and put a note on it to not turn it on.

Amazing what you can get away with if you have some official tape and a notice.

/johnny