How essential is an oven for fulltiming?

Our Allegro Bay came with the micro/convec Sharp and no oven. I cook everything in it and got to liking it so much I had the same thing put into my sticks and bricks to replace the micro only. In over a year now I have used the oven only once and that was because I already had the main dish in the Sharp! We have owned two motor homes and neither came with an oven so I have zero experience with an RV oven.

"can't remember ever having bread baked at home"...Wow, no fresh baked bread smell ? Never ? No bread fresh from the oven (in this case, convection oven) smothered with butter ? I can't remember the last time I bought bread....

Regards
Gemstone

We use the convection oven exclusively right now, but also have a gas oven for times when we might want to have two different things cooking at once. Will probably only use the gas oven at Thanksgiving though.

RVcrazy wrote:
Have any of you given up an oven for more kitchen storage? If so, what do you do instead for bread or things you would normally cook in one?

for bread I go to the store. can't remember ever having bread baked at home. should cut down on carbs anyway.
bumpy

Another vote for the convection/microwave. Much better heat distribution and more accurate temperature control than a regular rv oven. We also had an induction cooktop installed and it can boil water so much quicker than the propane gas cooktops we had always used. Modern science...it's fantastic.

haven't missed one in over ten years of traveling. I use a crock pot for big cuts of beef and chicken breasts etc. and the grill for steaks and chicken breasts and burgers etc. The crock pot will cook a half ham or a small turkey or roasting hen.
For frying fish, I do that outdoors on an elec burner.
For biscuits, I use my iron skillet over low heat and under a lid. I carefully turn over the entire batch when the bottom is nice and brown.

I think you will find that people who have an oven think that is the only thing to have , and that people who have a microwave / convection (myself included) know that you can do anything you want in the convection including baking bread. Everything browns just like it does in a conventional oven. I have never met anyone who had a regular oven and a microwave/convection in their rig. I'm not sure if any even come with both. I know some people we have met are afraid of a micro/convection just the same as they are afraid of computers. They will not even try one to see how it works or if they like it. I do not have a toaster oven as I haven't found the need for one, not even for frozen garlic bread.

We cook the same as before full-timing but the convection oven will do it all - breads, cookies, casseroles, meat, small turkey, etc. It's not the same as a microwave. It's an actual oven OR a microwave. You can do both. We love it.

I don't understand the not use the oven people. It makes me wonder if they ever cooked when they had a permanent residence? Personally we eat the same now as we did when we owned a home. So the oven gets used regularly. As the weather gets nicer we will cook far more on the grill outside, but the oven will still get used a lot.

I am opting for a cooktop only and a convection microwave in my next RV. I have an oven in mine but it hasn't worked for years and I don't miss it at all. Right now I store pans in it. I bake everything we could possibly want in the convection oven, and lately have started baking on top of the gas grill. Makes fantastic biscuits and rolls without heating up the RV in the summer. The secret is to use two pie pans, with an air space between them...in other words the pan with the rolls is larger than the one it sits in. That keeps the bottoms from burning.
I have a friend who uses her RV oven all the time, so it's just a matter of preference.