Steam ovens are becoming more and more popular, once the reserve of the restaurant or just used commercially – here at Gerald Giles we are seeing more and more people buying them for their home. We stock Miele’s freestanding steam oven, their built in steam oven and their combi steam/conventional oven. We also have a Bosch built in version and a Neff combi.

Miele, Bosch and Neff are all great brands, all of their appliances including their steam ovens are brilliant.

But what is so different about a steam oven? Well the obvious thing is that while your conventional oven will use hot air to cook food, a steam oven has a water reservoir that when boiled fills the cooking chamber with a cloud of steam. It’s the steam that cooks the food.

So what are the advantages of steam ovens?

Firstly – they are healthier. More of the nutrients are retained when steam cooking meaning you get more goodness from the food. That’s particularly true when steaming vegetables.

Next, the food also retains more of its flavour and texture. And it’s nice and moist because of the steam.

Like a micro wave you can’t brown a chicken in a steam oven but you can pop the bird into a conventional oven after its cooked to do that. Or get a combi like the Neff one.

Like a micro wave you can reheat and defrost food in a steam oven.

At a recent Miele steam oven demo, the chef cooked a salmon main and poached pear desert – at the same time, in the same oven! She did this to prove that the fish taste and smell didn’t taint the lovely pear pudding. It didn’t.

She also cooked the cake pictured at the start of this post. So you can basically bake cakes in a steam oven. Which we thought was pretty amazing.

A few other advantages – cleaning is easy, they cooking times are shorter and compared to a conventional oven, steam ovens are very energy efficient.

We think that the free standing version is a great addition to any kitchen and if you’re planning a new kitchen then you should think about including a steam oven in your plans.

You’ll end up using it more than you think and certainly more than the George Foreman grill or the sandwich toaster that are tucked away in a cupboard, unused and feeling sorry for themselves.

Happy cooking!