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I have question. I bought a microwave oven that has a grill and convection oven function. It comes with a grill rack and turntable.

2 days ago, I tried to cook frozen pizza with the grill rack without the turntable and while it is cook, the center of the pizza is not really cooked. Yesterday I tried frozen fried calamari with the grill rack on the turntable and it doesn't brown as much. I read somewhere that convection oven cooks faster but in my case, it seems slower.

The question I need help with would be do I put the grill rack on top of the turntable while using the convection mode? So I am not sure if I should cook with the grill rack on or off the turntable.

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I hope the moderators will allow me to go off tangent and contribute my own notes of my personal experience. As per your observation,

"...the center of the pizza is not really cooked."

So will other foods you put in to bake in convection mode. It does not work as well as a industrial turntable oven.

So because the center of the cake will cook slower, you probably need to lower the temperature even further and hence a usual size cake may take up to 1-1/2 hours to bake.

Worse for cookies. Those that are lined near the rim of the round baking pan have their outer halves more baked than the inner halves. So at the half way mark of the baking time, I have to take them out and rotate each and every cookie 180º. Since I bake them on three levels, I also switch the bottom tray with the center one as the heat is not even for these two levels.

Lesson learned. I will get a normal oven for my kind of bakes. For anyone out there interested to get a turntable oven, make sure the one you are interested has a blast of heat directing at the center.

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    You're actually doing better than me with your multi-layer cooking. My top tier of two would be prone to browning too fast on top; the bottom would be only a little quicker than keeping hot. I do find a lot of heat escapes when opening the door so try to avoid doing so (and turn the real oven on for baking)
    – Chris H
    Jun 14, 2018 at 12:37
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Mine requires the turntable in all modes. In grill or oven mode there's a metal baking sheet that goes on top, then the (optional) grill rack. Mine applies heat (grill or convection) simultaneously with the microwaves; some alternate the two, which is slower, and preheating is more important.

If you look carefully you'll probably find that the grill element doesn't cover the whole cooking area, so the food needs to keep moving to cook evenly. I find that preheating on convection only, then using a combination mode is very quick, but if the microwave part is set too high the food cooks before it browns. Some foods are best started on combination then finished with just convection to brown them. Convection alone is slower than microwave alone for almost all foods.

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