Information about Oven

An oven is an enclosed compartment for heating, baking or drying. It is most commonly used in cooking and pottery. Two common kinds of modern ovens are gas ovens and electric ovens. Ovens used in pottery are also known as kilns. An oven used for heating or for industrial processes is called a furnace or industrial oven.

History

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Ancient Greek portable oven
Settlements across the Indus Valley Civilization were the first to have an oven within each mud-brick house by 3200 BC. [1]

Culinary historians credit the Greeks for developing bread baking into an art. Proper front-loaded bread ovens originated in Ancient Greece. The Greeks created a wide variety of doughs, loaf shapes and styles of serving bread with other foods. Baking developed as a trade and profession as bread increasingly was prepared outside of the family home by specially trained workers to be sold to the public.

The Greeks also pioneered sweetbreads, fritters, puddings, cheesecakes, pastries, and even wedding cakes. Often prepared in symbolic shapes, these products were originally served during special occasions and ceremonies. By 300 AD, the Greeks had developed over seventy different kinds of bread.

Cooking

In cooking, the conventional oven is a kitchen appliance and is used for roasting and heating. Food normally cooked in this manner includes meat, casseroles and baked goods such as bread, cake and other desserts.

In the past, cooking ovens were fueled by wood or coal. Modern ovens are fueled by gas or electricity. When an oven is contained in a complete stove, the burners on the top of the stove may use the same or different fuel than the oven.

Ovens usually can use a variety of methods to cook. The most common may be to heat the oven from below. This is commonly used for baking and roasting. The oven may also be able to heat from the top to provide broiling. In order to provide faster, more-even cooking, convection ovens use a small fan to blow hot air around the cooking chamber. An oven may also provide an integrated rotisserie.

Steam ovens introduce water (in the form of steam) into the cooking chamber. This can aid the formation of a crisp crust on baked goods and prevent the drying-out of fish and casseroles. The degree of humidity is usually selectable among at least several steps. Some steam ovens use water carried to the oven by the user in a container; others are permanently connected to the building plumbing.

More modern ovens, such as General Electric's Trivection oven, may also provide combined thermal and microwave cooking. This can greatly speed the cooking of certain types of food while maintaining the traditional characteristics of oven cooking such as browning.

Ovens also vary in the way that they are controlled. The simplest ovens (for example, the AGA cooker) may not have any controls at all; the several ovens simply run continuously at various temperatures. More-conventional ovens have a simple thermostat: this both turns the oven on and off and selects the temperature at which it will operate. Set to the highest setting, this may also enable the broiler element. A timer may allow the oven to be turned on and off automatically at pre-set times. More-sophisticated ovens may have complex, computer-based controls allowing a wide variety of operating modes and special features including the use of a temperature probe to automatically shut the oven off when the food is completely cooked to the desired degree.

Some ovens provide various aids to cleaning. Continuous cleaning ovens have the oven chamber coated with a catalytic surface that helps break down (oxidize) food splatters and spills over time. Self cleaning ovens use pyrolytic decomposition (extreme heat) to oxidize dirt. Steam ovens may provide a wet-soak cycle to loosen dirt, allowing easier manual removal. In the absence of any special methods, chemical oven cleaners are sometimes used or just old-fashioned scrubbing.

Industrial, scientific, and artisanal use

Outside the culinary world, ovens are used for a number of purposes.
  • A furnace is used either to provide heat to a building or to melt substances such as glass or metal for further processing. A blast furnace is a particular type of furnace generally associated with metal smelting (particularly steel manufacture) using refined coke or similar hot-burning substance as a fuel, with air pumped in under pressure to increase the temperature of the fire.
  • A kiln is a high-temperature oven used in ceramics and cement manufacture to convert mineral feedstock (in the form of clay or calcium or aluminum rocks) into a glassier, more solid form. In the case of ceramic kilns, a shaped clay object is the final result, while cement kilns produce a substance called clinker that is crushed to make the final cement product. (Certain types of drying ovens used in food manufacture, especially those used in malting, are also referred to as kilns.)
  • An autoclave is an oven-like device with features similar to a pressure cooker that allows the heating of aqueous solutions to higher temperatures than water's boiling point in order to sterilize the contents of the autoclave.
  • Industrial ovens are similar to their culinary equivalents, and are used for a number of different applications that do not require the high temperatures of a kiln or furnace.

See also

External links

Cooking is the act of preparing food for eating by the application of heat. It encompasses a vast range of methods, tools and combinations of ingredients to alter the flavor or digestibility of food.
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Pottery is the ceramic ware made by potters. In everyday usage the term is taken to encompass a wide range of ceramics, including earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. The places where such wares are made are called potteries.
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Kilns are thermally insulated chambers, or ovens, in which a controlled temperature regimes are produced. They are used to harden, burn or dry materials. Specific uses include:
  • To dry green lumber so that the lumber can be used immediately

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furnace is a device used for heating.

In American English, the term furnace on its own is generally used to describe household heating systems based on a central furnace (known either as a boiler or a heater in British English), and sometimes as a synonym for kiln,
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This article has been tagged since September 2007.

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The Indus Valley Civilization (c. 3000–1500 BCE, flourished 2600–1900 BCE), abbreviated IVC, was an ancient civilization that flourished in the Indus and Ghaggar-Hakra river valleys primarily in what is now Pakistan and western India, extending westward into
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and

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17,000,000
Regions with significant populations
 Greece [1]
 United States
 Cyprus
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fougasse or as fouace in the rest of southern France. It is usually seasoned with olive oil and herbs, and often either topped with cheese or stuffed with meat or vegetables. Focaccia doughs are similar in style and texture to pizza doughs.
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The term ancient Greece refers to the periods of Greek history in Classical Antiquity, lasting ca. 750 BC[1] (the archaic period) to 146 BC (the Roman conquest). It is generally considered to be the seminal culture which provided the foundation of Western Civilization.
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Sweetbread is the name of a dish made of the thymus gland or pancreas of an animal younger than one year old. These animals are usually lambs or calves. According to Four Story Hill Farms, no American slaughterhouse has processed pancreas for chefs in over forty years.
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fritter is any kind of food coated in batter and deep fried. The word comes from the Latin frictura ("frying") by way of Old French and Middle English. It can refer to a dessert, a side dish or a main course food.
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Pudding most often refers to a dessert, but can also be a savory dish. There are two main types.

The word pudding probably comes from the French boudin via the Latin botellus
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Cheesecake, Commercially Prepared
Nutritional value per 100 g (3.5 oz)

Energy 0 kcal   0 kJ

Carbohydrates     25.5 g
Fat 22.5 g
Protein 5.5 g
Percentages are relative to US
recommendations for adults.
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Pastry is the name given to various kinds of baked goods made from ingredients such as flour, butter, shortening, baking powder or eggs. It may also refer to the dough from which such baked goods are made. Pastry dough is rolled out thinly and used as a base for baked goods.
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wedding cake is the traditional cake served to the guests at a wedding reception (in England, at a wedding breakfast) after a wedding. In modern western culture, it is usually a large cake, multi-layered or tiered, and heavily decorated with icing, occasionally over a layer of
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3rd century - 4th century
270s  280s  290s  - 300s -  310s  320s  330s
297 298 299 - 300 - 301 302 303
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A kitchen, at least in the western view of the word, is a room or part of a room (sometimes called "kitchen area" or in modern times in the USA "kitchenette") used for food preparation including cooking, and sometimes also for eating and entertaining guests, if the kitchen is large
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Appliance may refer to a device with a narrow function:
  • Home appliance, routine household tasks, using electricity or some other energy input.
  • Small appliances
  • Major appliances

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Roasting is a cooking method that utilizes dry heat, whether an open flame, oven, or other heat source. Roasting usually causes caramelization of the surface of the food, which is considered a flavor enhancement. Meats and most root and bulb vegetables can be roasted.
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Meat, in its broadest definition, is animal tissue used as food. Most often it refers to skeletal muscle and associated fat, but it may also refer to non-muscle organs, including lungs, livers, skin, brains, bone marrow and kidneys.
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In cooking a casserole, from the French for "sauce pan,"[1] is a large, deep pot or dish used both in the oven and as a serving dish. In the mid-twentieth century, the word also came to be used for the food cooked and served in such a dish.
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fougasse or as fouace in the rest of southern France. It is usually seasoned with olive oil and herbs, and often either topped with cheese or stuffed with meat or vegetables. Focaccia doughs are similar in style and texture to pizza doughs.
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Key Addressed Crypto Encapsulation, or CAKE is a network protocol that lives on top of the Internet Protocol, SMTP, or any of a wide variety of other protocols. The basic idea of the protocol is to use public key identifiers as the base addressing scheme for the protocol.
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Dessert is a course that typically comes at the end of a meal, usually consisting of sweet food but sometimes of a strongly-flavored one, such as some cheeses.
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The WOOD callsign may refer to:
  • WOOD-TV – an NBC-affiliated television station in Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • WOOD (AM) – an AM radio station in Grand Rapids, Michigan
  • WOOD-FM - an FM radio station in Grand Rapids, Michigan




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Coal (IPA: /ˈkəʊl/) is a fossil fuel formed in swamp ecosystems where plant remains were saved by water and mud from oxidization and biodegradation.
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Fuel gas can refer to any of several gases burned to produce thermal energy.

Natural gas (methane) is the most common fuel gas, but others include:
  • Town gas
  • Syngas
  • Propane
  • Butane
  • Regasified liquified petroleum gas
  • Wood gas
  • Producer gas

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Electricity (from New Latin ēlectricus, "amberlike") is a general term for a variety of phenomena resulting from the presence and flow of electric charge. This includes many well-known physical phenomena such as lightning, electromagnetic fields and electric currents,
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