BTW - I've never been brave enough to try the "combination cooking" feature of our oven. This uses a combination of microwave and convection heat to more quickly roast something, I think. It makes sense. But almost no recipes came with the book, and I guess I'm expecting my first attempts to be a disaster and I'm not quite willing to sacrifice the food to learn how to get it right.
No fear-- it's easier than it looks. Combi doesn't use that much more power than regular convection cooking.
Set combi, use the same temperature as you would for convection-only cooking, and knock five minutes off of every 30 minutes of convection time. It'll either "smell done" or you'll cut into the finished result and decide to give it another 1-2 minutes. Keep notes and build your own cookbook.
It's particularly effective for frozen foods with a high water content, since the microwaves heat up the water molecules most efficiently throughout the food mass. If you fill the oven (a large pan of frozenlasagna) then the microwaves may not propagate all the way to the center before being attenuated by the rest of the mass.
In our oven a thawed one-inch hand-sized filet of ahi would take about 18-20 minutes on convection. With combi (at the same convection temperature) it takes 14-15 minutes and it's more evenly cooked on the inside. It's also more moist because it hasn't been spending extra time evaporating its water content under convection heat.
You'd probably see the same effect with steak or other slabs of beef (I don't eat them often enough to use the convection/microwave). However using combi on chicken legs (bone inside) only saves about five minutes out of a 45-minute cooking time. Better yet, a turkey roast (those three-pound mashups of turkey meat wrapped in string nets) only takes 65 minutes instead of 90-120. We figured that one out by smell.
I haven't tried it on an 8-10 pound whole turkey yet, but I'll have my chance soon.
Our Magic Chef is 1.0 cu ft with a 1000W microwave generator and a 1450W convection system. The manual says that combi only uses a total of 1500W so the extra microwave energy isn't using much more power-- just more efficiently.
It turns out that the oven also has an 850W grilling coil set in the ceiling. Never used it, but I guess that would take care of the browning. I don't think it can be turned on with combi.
The whole thing weighs 45 pounds, which is probably why I'm having so much trouble finding an under-cabinet or wall-mounted version...
