Technically, aren't roasting and baking same thing to the oven, even though an oven may have separated selections for the two? The oven uses the same element. I am not referring to the special auto-roast feature having multiple cooking stages. So what's the special about roasting? If an oven can bake, it should be able to roast.

RE: Miele vs Wolf. We have a vacation home with Miele speed oven (2010)(combo of microwave and convection with broiler), 30" convection oven, and induction cooktop. We use the speed oven for everything except large meats due to its speed of heating up with the 'rapid heat' feature, but find it inconvenient to not have a microwave available if we are using the oven. But, to simply microwave requires about 5 or 6 steps on the digital panel, a big PITA. And, guests cannot figure out how to use the German minimalist controls for the induction and the microwave. Form over function! So, with our new home in Seattle (2015) we used all Wolf this time. We use the steam convection oven daily, and we don't clean it much. I did a side by side at Albert Lee showroom putting muffins and almond croissants into the Wolf and the Miele, both cold, set both to steam convection at about 360ºF. The Wolf was easier to set (even the showroom person had difficulty navigating the Miele minimalist digital screen). In about 5 minutes the Wolf produced internally moist, externally browned and crispy croissants, the Miele was not yet flaky or crisp on the outside. So, that made my decision for me! Does anyone know if the baking soda/peroxide past cleaning regimen damages the Wolf CSO? Thanks all for the entries. I am late in responding, having just read the thread.

I think you'll be absolutely fine with just a CSO. There certainly are advantages to having multiple (different) ovens. But it's not something you could do without. We are very fortunate to have three ovens in our kitchen: the CSO, the SpeedOven, and a 30" gas oven in the Bluestar range. While I don't use all of them all the time, having three ovens is extremely convenient when hosting large multi-course dinners. It's a game changer in making sure that every dish is ready on time. It's not unusual for me to have a dozen different dishes/sides, and time management gets complex when preparing all of these. But if that's not something you do on a regular basis, then obviously you wouldn't benefit from making this choice, and the space and money savings of only buying a single CSO can go to good use elsewhere. There are a few things that make me use our gas oven instead of the CSO. It has a much bigger cavity. This is rarely needed as I tend to debone all my roasts whenever possible and a deboned 20+ lbs turkey is so small, it would easily fit into the CSO. But when I do need this much space then it certainly is nice to be able to make use of it. Also, it has the most amazingly super-powerful broiler element. It's as close to a commerical salamander as you can get in a residential kitchen. We use it several times a week just for that. Can't get any better toasted bread any other way. Finally, while the CSO and the SpeedOven are a bit of a pain to keep clean, the gas oven doesn't show splatter as much nor does it get damaged by splatter (this is a little bit of a worry with all the complex components in a CSO; I don't want to clog the fan, the steam ports or the drain). So, whenever I prepare particularly splattery food (e.g. roasted pork belly or even just the aformentioned turkey), I prefer the gas oven. But that's mostly a question of using the best tool for the job, and with three different ovens I make a different choice from what you would make. You might just need to spend a little more elbow grease making sure your CSO gets cleaned thorough when cooking more challenging ingredients. On the other hand, there are cases that would make me strongly prefer the CSO over my gas oven. The most obvious one is any time that I am making smaller servings. The CSO preheats within a few minutes, whereas my big gas oven takes between 20 and 45min to be fully preheated. And of course, there are countless recipes where a CSO is the objectively superior tool, as steam injection is so incredibly useful. I am still discovering new uses on a regular basis (e.g. made haggis from scratch for Burns Night a few weeks ago). And I have favorites that I don't know how I ever managed without a CSO (e.g. making a big batch for fresh gnocchi). A downside with the CSO is that it doesn't cool down quickly. This can be confusing. If you are used to cook items by putting them into the cold oven, then cooking times will be very wrong if somebody used the CSO right before you. My family regularly makes boiled eggs in the CSO. Works amazingly well, fool-proof, and you can get the eggs to exactly the hardness that you like. But if the oven is still hot, this doesn't work the same. That's gotten me yelled at once or twice before :-)

@Mr Kyle I'm also interested in your question. In my home we have a non Miele 30" convection oven and a 24" Miele CSO. We end up using the Miele CSO for most cooking because it's more energy efficient with the use of space and does most everything the CO does and more. We end up using the larger 30" oven (without steam injection) for when we want to do homemade Neapolitan pizzas on a pizza steel, and for baking two sourdough loaves at a time (crockpot method or wetted mixing bowl on top method), which is our typical use case. Essentially, it's used 10% of the time. We sometimes use the MagicChef settings when we know what's going on with time, temperature, and humidity level for each step. Miele seems to have done away with sharing that information in recent ovens that have MagicChef Plus, so we would be less inclined to get something new from them.