loves, I open the oven door and let it cool that way. If I were to leave the oven door closed, indeed the fan runs a while but not 1 1/2 hrs ! Yikes! I had read somewhere on the forum that you might injure the electronics by leaving the oven door open as it cools since I guess they were saying the hot air rising over the front controls would/could damage the innards. Well it doesn't say anything in the book about this and I have been doing it over a year. My ovens preheat really fast. I never start the preheat for say my bread , which I make at least 1x a week, until I have the loaves risen to double. My DH does preheat the baking stone for 30 min and also the Le Creuset pot when he makes Sullivan Bread. Other than that I have not done anything special about preheating or baking. The Miele have a lot of special modes so if you are using the probe you do put the meat in the oven as it is preheating and you follow the screen for the probe plug in etc. I have never had a failure in the ovens. If I bake, roast, rotisserie, cakes, cookies, bread ,quiche turkey etc everything has been prefect. I use the ovens a lot and am very happy with them. I have not baked 6 pans of cookies using both ovens, as we just don't eat cookies since there are no little ones anymore. I keep thinking though that I will try it to see if indeed the convection will brown/cook them all as it says it will. If I do I will be sure to post and let everyone know. caroline

Oh, I have never believed those oven-beeps, LOL I know it takes 20 or 25 minutes for my ovens to preheat (depending on the set point, which is usually either 350 or 375) but I was wondering how much the hidden-element style adds to that timeframe (if at all, which logically I would think it does?). I mentioned the GE unit only because we are 90% sure that's the one we are going to choose, and wanted to know if others are seeing exceptionally long preheat times with it. Electricity is expensive in our area and so if it takes 45-60 minutes to preheat that particular oven to a true 350 degrees, that would give me pause ... especially if an alternative range would take less time to do the same thing.

If I understand correctly, you probably can set your oven for convection in two different ways. In one way, probably the one you used, you tell the oven the desired temperature for nonconvection cooking and it lowers the oven temperature for convection automatically, giving you what is considered equivalent cooking environment -- in this case, 325 degrees convection is equivalent to 350 degree conventional. In the second way to cook convection, you set the temperature you want directly, so that no automatic adjustment is made. The first way can be convenient if you are following a recipe that calls for a certain temperature in conventional, and you are not sure what would happen if you use convection. But your experience seems to suggest that you got the desired result with your hens, but it took too long. It seems to me that if you usually cook the hens at 425 in conventional, 325 in convection is a little too low. I think the discrepancy in oven temperatures is not that great. Does your owner's manual give you any guidance on the temp setting for convection for different roasts? Ours does. We have a Bosch. I think you need to experiment a little. I would google convection oven temp and see what turns up.

I use a microwave convection all the time. I've never considered preheating to be an issue. I might add a few minutes to the overall cook time if I start from a cold oven, but that's about it. I bake potatoes, rolls, etc. I reheat pizza (set to about 375* and wrap the pizza slices in foil, go for about 15-20 minutes). Hotter temps require longer to preheat, but certainly no more (and usually less) than the large oven. It is not a toaster. Toast bread elsewhere. I don't have to wait for it to cool down to use the microwave, but I do some anyway since the interior is hot. I usually use a metal rack to hold food off the bottom and that thing will be hot to remove if I don't let it cool a bit. YMMV.