September 8, 2009
Living Without An Oven—Would You?
This photo by Flickr user lissame makes me rather jealous.
Hope everyone had an enjoyable Labor Day weekend!
Ours involved moving between apartments, which is never fun, but my husband and I are happy to have more space. There’s just one problem with our new place: It doesn’t have an oven. Not a full-sized one, anyway.
Instead, there’s a four-burner range top, and something above it called a “SpaceSaver” that looks like a microwave but purports to also be a convection oven. I don’t really understand how it works yet, but even when I do, it’s going to take some adjustment.
Sure, I’ve never actually roasted a turkey, or baked a towering bundt cake, or whipped up a Julia Child-style soufflé …but now I can’t. I can’t bake anything bigger than 8 ½ inches high or 20 ½ inches wide or 13 ½ inches deep. A single cookie sheet fits inside the SpaceSaver; but our brand-new pizza stone and round pizza pans are suddenly useless, as is our cast-iron dutch oven and possibly the popover pans.
For us, the apartment’s many “pros” (washer/dryer, dishwasher, good layout, natural light, safe neighborhood) outweighed this one “con,” but we’ll see if we still feel that way when the lease is up for renewal.
What about you—could you live without an oven (assuming you still had a range top)? Apparently, some people not only can, they prefer to. Is there any other kitchen appliance you consider essential? (For me, that’s the coffeemaker.)
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I used to love my tabletop convection oven when I had it. It would cook a 13 pound turkey, enough for, um, at least us two. It’s all I had as an oven for many years. Did chicken well and wasn’t much to clean.
If that “Space Saver” is a combo microwave/convection oven I’d toss it as far as you can. Or use it to store insecticides or other poisons.
james
I’ve given up on coffeemakers; I use my grandmother’s percolator. Good luck with the “oven” — I wouldn’t be without my real oven!
This article totally hits home for me. I am living in Tokyo and do not have an oven either. I have a fish oven- about a food deep, 6 inches wide and maybe 3 inches tall- that I use for, well, fish. I just brought a counter top toaster oven back from the States, which actually works well for baking cookies, but no Turkey’s will be roasting in this kitchen, that’s for sure! Here’s a link to a blog post I wrote about my kitchen sans oven: http://tokyoterrace.wordpress.com/2009/08/31/my-little-corner-kitchen/
Great post! I enjoyed reading it!
Oh my! Well, there’s two ways to look at your dilemma — you’re either going to be very frustrated, or you’re going to make the most of it and be creative!!! Sounds like a British solution for the oven. Poor mom managed for 3 years without an oven — definately annoying, but do-able. And, I have a bunch of friends in the bush in Africa who make do as well — so fascinating to find out how other people get creative.
We were without an oven for almost 2 years. Ours broke and we didnt want to pay to have it fixed. So, we learned how to use the toaster oven to do everything we did in the oven, just in smaller portions. For a family of four, we worked it and made the best of it.
Wow. I would need an oven for pizza or casserole or quiche, but it wouldn’t have to be huge — it would be nice to have a broiler though. We just moved apartments and I had to give up my gas burners — now *that* is driving me nuts!
Lucky, lucky you! Two days before Thanksgiving, 1981 our vintage stove 1932 oven went out With delivery of the part said to take two weeks, my husband and I hit every possible store in Fort Worth and found something I had never heard about: a convection oven that would hold a 20 lb bird. Yes it was bigger than what you see now but it changed our summertimes. This miracle did not heat up our kitchen, made two big cookie sheets, big sheet cakes, popovers, corn bread in a ten inch cast iron skillet and large casseroles and we could still eat in the kitchen. Cooked fast and cleaned with a swipe with no bending. It worked so well that I fed one husband and five kids with no trouble. Alas, it was stolen. But it gave us some great years and I never used that stove’s oven again.
[...] pizza, pasta or even mac and cheese. (Of course, it would be nice baked into homemade bread, too, if we had an oven…) Any other [...]
[...] of this makes me stop and think…I’ve been whining lately about not having a “real” oven in my new apartment, but I do have a range top, fueled by gas which I can summon with a simple [...]