Combi-ovens – Keep it simple!

There aren't many manufacturing processes which have stayed basically the same for 2,000 years - give or take the odd millennium - but cooking has. Chefs still bake, boil, grill, roast and fry in the same way as when Julius Caesar stepped ashore with Britain's first wood-burning pizza oven.

But the equipment has changed. It's become more efficient, bigger, faster… and more complicated. This last point is my beef. Some of it's starting to get too complicated, and nowhere is this more apparent than with combi-ovens.

Manufacturers are competing with each other to make the next model of combi-oven more complex than the last. What happened to simplicity and user-friendliness? Combi-ovens are increasingly being designed for equipment salesmen to baffle chefs with bells, whistles and flashing lights, and it's time design engineers got back to designing them for chefs.

My role with Hilton Hotels means I meet a lot of manufacturers and see a lot of combi-oven demonstrations. Why do manufacturers think I'll be more impressed by a cooking programme that can bake 1,000 scones an hour without a single currant burning, when what most chefs want to do with a combi-oven is roast a joint of meat and halfway through the cook cycle bung a couple of trays of potatoes in to roast?

Printed circuit boards drive these hugely complicated combi-ovens, but no matter how much manufacturers claim they're insulated from the heat and steam, after door gaskets they're the biggest cause of breakdowns. The double whammy of a fuse blowing in the computer system is that you can't just override it and run the combi in a manual mode - it just stops.

Here's another example of technology gone mad. One of our hotel kitchens has a combi-oven with an automatic closing door. The chef says there are two locks to the system and each time a lock goes wrong it costs £550 to replace.

There's a niche market for combi-ovens that are totally computer-driven, linked to an office 300 miles away that records what the core temperature of the turkey was five minutes before the oven automatically switched off. But that's not what most chefs need from a combi-oven, or want to pay for.

On another recent combi demonstration, the display panel on the front suddenly went off like hazard warning lights on a car dashboard. Symbols rather than words appeared, presumably so the oven can be sold without modification in 100 countries with the hope that the flashing icons can be understood from Brighton to Belize.

There's still the instruction manual, of course, but they get more and more complicated, so what must they be like for chefs for whom English isn't the first language?

Cooking is about balancing time and temperature. So why is it so difficult to find a combi-oven with just a thermostat and a bell that rings when the food's cooked?

Chefs don't just walk in from the JobCentre to be given charge of a banquet the next day. Chefs are trained and disciplined in time management of the food they're cooking.

There's constant talk that kitchens are becoming deskilled and that convenience food and bean-counting operators are to blame, but equipment manufacturers also have a hand in the deskilling issue by turning out ovens which need less and less chef skill.

We've got a new Hilton hotel opening soon, and it's got a nice new kitchen with sparkly equipment and a team of Hilton chefs who've worked all their careers with combi-ovens. Yet we've been asked to set aside two days for equipment training. That covers all the equipment, but if manufacturers had some commonality in the way they fix the controls, those two days could be cut to a half-day.

But I've come across one combi-oven that restored some of my faith in manufacturers. It had knobs which basically said the options were steam, roast, hotter and cooler. Unglamorous, but sensible and wonderfully functional. Every combi-oven manufacturer should have one.

Roger Hulstone is food innovations manager with Hilton Hotels