Convection ovens are best left with the food service people and at the fast food restaurants where they are used to bake cookies, pastries, biscuits, and heat main dishes. Air impingement ovens are the things that bake pizzas. There is a huge difference between the two. Convection ovens typically have a fan that just circulates air within the oven while air impingement ovens have highly focused jets of air that strike (impinge upon) the product at a roughly 90 degree angle from both the top and bottom of the product. With a convection oven you don’t have a lot of control over the bake except to change the temperature and with some ovens you can go from high to low air circulation or turn it off completely for part of the baking cycle, but with an air impingement oven you can change the baking temperature and you can also go into the fingers through which the air is blown and change them too. This allows you to truly customize the bake for your specific needs.
Air deck ovens are actually a deck oven with air impingement baking technology. Think of a Lincoln, Middleby Marshall, or Star air impingement oven with a stationary conveyor and you have an air deck oven. They work well for baking pizzas but remember that as with any air impingement oven you will need to put the pizzas on some type of carrier such as a pan, screen or baking disk. If you want to achieve a hearth baked characteristic with one of these ovens look at using a dark colored anodized baking disk with holes in the center such as those from Lloyd Pans AKA Pizza Tools.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
