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OVEN TROUBLESHOOTING
Proper Cooking
Experimentation is about the only way to determine proper time and temperature settings.
While a food product may look perfectly cooked on the outside, the inside may be undercooked.
A thermometer is necessary to determine if food items are being properly cooked. Most health
departments have rules and regulations that establish minimum temperatures for internal food tem-
peratures. Most operators want to cook foods as fast as possible in order to serve more customers
per hour. However, cooking foods slower is the only way to achieve a proper internal temperature.
If your food products look acceptable on the outside, but have an internal temperature that is too
low, then lowering the temperature and decreasing the belt speed (thereby increasing the cook
time), will be necessary.
Several factors may affect the cooking performance and characteristics:
Oven temperature (generally affects color)
Conveyor speed (generally affects doneness)
Finger arrangement
Altitude
Pans versus screens
Dough thickness
Cheese type
Raw ingredient temperature (frozen?)
Quantity of toppings
XLT ovens can be configured to cook a wide variety of food items. This is accomplished
by designing a finger group to control the baking characteristics. Generally speaking, most cook-
ing is a “bottom up” process. The hot air from the bottom row of fingers has to go through the
conveyor (a distance of about 2” / 50.8mm), heat the pan or screen, and then actually cook the
food. The hot air from the top, on the other hand, basically only has to melt and re-heat precooked
toppings. Consequently, most operators will use the oven with the fingers arranged so that a lot
more air is directed to the bottom of the food than to the top. Finger cover plates are available that
have six rows of holes, four rows of holes, two rows of holes, and no holes (or blank cover plates).
A typical finger arrangement might have most or even all fingers on the bottom “full open”, that is
fingers with all six rows of holes, and only two or three fingers on top with four or six rows of
holes. The top fingers can be arranged in a symmetrical pattern or can be shifted asymmetrically
to either the entrance or exit end of the conveyor. We encourage you to experiment by trying dif-
ferent finger arrangements, temperatures and belt speeds. XLT can assist you with your oven/
product configurations.
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