I agree with Hector’s advice to get a tile for the oven. I have a pizza baking stone, about 1 inch thick, that I keep in my oven all the time. It keeps the oven temperature wonderfully consistent.
I remodeled my kitchen a year ago, and I put two 30-inch ranges next to each other. One range is a 10-year old Maytag “Super Capacity Plus.” I bought it because of two features: 1. Large oven capacity, and 2. Ability for oven temperature to go as low as 100 degrees F. I often use it as a warming oven to hold cooked food at 145 degrees for several hours. However, when it was my only oven (before I bought the second range), I baked with it, and it baked just fine with a pizza stone on the lowest shelf.
My second range is a Viking. I bought it because I wanted the highest BTU output on the cooktop burners, and I liked the fact that the heavy cast-iron grates cover the entire range top, so that I can slide heavy pots around without lifting them. I now use it as a primary baking oven, and it works fine. The oven capacity is a little smaller than my Maytag, but the advantage of the Viking is that you can flip the convention fan on and off at will, whereas the Maytag is a computerized console that you have to program and wait 5 minutes for the convection fan to kick in.
In my experience, you do not necessarily have to spend a lot of money for a good, reliable oven. You just have to look at all the technical information, decide what is most important to you (i.e., oven size, warranty, lack of computerized controls, etc.), and go with the one that fits your constraints.
If you decide to go with a Viking, do not get the self-clean model. I had a lot of problems with it. Eventually, the company had to replace it with a non-self-clean model that has been very reliable.
One last point. Even if you go with a good, reliable brand-name oven, there may be minor glitches in the way a particular oven functions. For example, the Viking repair guy told me that he serviced the ovens of a woman who is a professional caterer. She has an enormous kitchen with five identical Viking ovens in it. She swears that one of the ovens runs 25-degrees cooler than the other four. He has worked on that particular oven and cannot get it to work identically to the others. I am telling you this because, even though I don’t believe in “ghosts in the machine,” sometimes particular appliances seem to have their own “personality” that you have to take into account when you use them.
Good luck!
.
