One of the problems we see all too often when it comes to air impingement ovens is where someone goes out and buys a used oven, hooks it up and starts tossing pizzas at it. It just doesn’t work that way, what we see as an air impingement oven for pizzas someone else sees as an oven for baking fish, and yet another sees as an oven for baking bagels, or even pretzels. It is all in how the fingers are configured in the oven. Did you know that you can turn an air impingement oven into something closer to a convection oven, or even a radiant heat oven without airflow? Again, it’s all in what fingers the oven is set up with and how they are configured (positioned) in the oven. The main reason why so many people have problems with air impingement oven is because the oven is not properly set up to bake THEIR pizzas, sure, it baked someone else’s pizzas just fine, but THEIR pizza is not YOURS. As for the cheese issue, true, some cheese’s will brown faster than others but that fact can be accommodated with proper finger profiling. If you buy a used oven make sure you understand how the fingers work, and what the finger profile of the oven that you are about to buy is, don’t be afraid to go back to the oven manufacturer with the finger profile and ask them if the finger profile is at least one that they use in pizza applications, if it isn’t you can change out the fingers for different ones or change the profile, whatever is needed, be aware though that each of those fingers cost around $100.00 each.
A funny story: I helped open a pizzeria in San Antonio, TX a few years ago, for the type of pizzas being made we had to use a very unique (call it DIFFERENT) finger profile, for reasons of poor management the a new operator was brought in, he then proceeded to ATTEMPT to make a conventional pizza in that oven, needless to say he failed in every attempt. Store eventually closed and liquidated the equipment, Adam Peyton, AJ’s New York Pizza (Manhattan, KS) ends up buying the still new ovens complete with the hood system. I told him to buy the ovens sight unseen because I knew that that double stack of air impingement ovens had the exact same profile that he used for baking his pizzas…I developed that profile specifically for the type of pizzas that were made at AJ’s and at the San Antonio restaurant…If anybody else had bought those ovens they would have been very disappointed if they did not do their pre-purchase home work. Moral of the story, just because it looks like a “pizza” oven doesn’t mean it is one, and even if it was designed to bake pizzas, that doesn’t mean that it will bake YOUR pizzas to their optimum, but if you buy the oven new, there is no reason why it cannot be properly set up to bake YOUR pizzas to their optimum.
On a side note, air impingement ovens provide excellent management of moisture released from the vegetable toppings making for a drier pizza presentation which might be important if you do any DELCO business.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor
