Our Favourite Indoor and Outdoor Pizza Ovens, Reviewed
Photo illustration by Ian Sullivan Cant.
As much as we love a dependable home-oven pizza recipe (and we mean love; we have the recipes to prove it), there’s something incomparable about the particular texture a higher-temperature flame oven achieves on dough. Crispy, chewy, that signature leopard print pattern on the crust.
Chatelaine editors tested out indoor and outdoor pizza oven models at different price points to determine if investing in one of your own is worth it—and which ones can achieve that desired professional result.
Cuisinart Indoor Pizza Oven, $400
This electric oven is excellent for making focaccia, calzone and a quick New York-style pie—but it doesn’t hit the high temperatures that Neapolitan-style pizza requires. (The oven guide says you can make a Neapolitan at 700F for 15 minutes, but that airy, blistered and slightly chewy crust can’t happen without a temperature of at least 800F.) Still, at $300, this is one of the most affordable options on the market, and it comes with a tool kit to boot: a pizza stone, a metal peel with a wooden handle and a nonstick deep dish pan. The oven is light and compact—it fits easily on the countertop—and takes just 10 to 15 minutes to heat up. — Jan Reitchelle Atanacio, food writer
Ooni Koda 2 ($649) and Ooni Koda 2 Max ($1,499)
I’ve been cooking with my gas-powered Ooni pizza oven for four summers now, and I still love it. It consistently heats up to 800F within 15 minutes and turns out reliably crispy, blistered pizzas in two to three minutes. The only hitch: the Ooni Koda 2’s cooking space fits one pizza at a time. If you can splurge, upgrade to the Koda Max, which boasts almost twice the cooking space and a higher ceiling. With either model, don’t limit yourself to pizza. If it can lay flat in a cast-iron frying pan (steak, flatbreads, veggies, fish), you can cook it in these ovens. —Chantal Braganza, deputy editor food
Bakerstone Original Pizza Oven, $395
This oven is super simple to use: It connects easily to your barbecue’s gas tank, takes 15 to 20 minutes to heat up and has an indicator that shows when the temperature is in the right range for pizza. The oven is hotter at the back, so you’ll have to rotate the pizza regularly, but once I got the hang of it I got that slightly charred, doughy, pizza-shop smell in three to four minutes of cooking. While I hesitate to recommend anything gas-powered—if we’re serious about the climate crisis, we need to cut down what we burn—propane is at least cleaner than burning wood or charcoal. — Gillian Grace, deputy digital editor
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Chantal Braganza is a writer and editor living in Toronto. She is deputy editor, food at Chatelaine, a cookbook nerd, lover of vintage dish ware, and currently training for yoga teacher certification. Her first book, Story of Your Mother, is out with Strange Light Press.
