Compare the Top 8 Pizza Ovens

Tips and FAQ

Honorable Mentions

We’ve tried a lot of pizza ovens. Here are a few that we liked that didn’t quite make our top picks.

Solo Stove Pi Prime for $450: The Solo Stove Pi Prime remains a very, very tight contender for our top gas oven pick. If you’ve heard of Solo Stove, it’s because of its smokeless, stainless steel fire pits. This made the company’s transition to high-heat pizza ovens more or less seamless. Instead of the conventional elongated design, the Pi Prime oven’s fuel attachments are long and slim and hug the back of the oven. This allows Solo Stove to keep its signature round, symmetrical design. This really is a great design, and this remarkably compact propane pizza oven has previously been among WIRED’s top picks. The cooking surface is large enough to accommodate a large Lodge cast-iron pan. If you have a small backyard, the top’s flat surface is a convenient storage space, and the stove doesn’t sacrifice any of its heating capabilities for these details. So why is the Koda 2 better than Solo Stove Pi Prime in our books? The Koda 2 allows for bigger 14-inch pies, and the broader opening makes launching a bit easier. (But note, if you live in a windy area, the Pi Prime offers better wind shielding than the Koda.)

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Halo Versa 16 for $499: At first blush, the Halo Versa 16 appears to offer much the same specs as the All-Clad gas-powered pizza oven, but for half the price. It’s got a rotating pizza stone, room for a 16-inch pie, and a clever extra feature: a little heater under the pizza stone. This said, the built-in thermometer isn’t accurate (at all!), and insulation isn’t the best, leading to a hot exterior. The oven doesn’t reach its advertised top temps of 950 degrees Fahrenheit, though it can generally heat the stone to about 800 degrees. Consider this a better oven for New York–style pies, at a quite affordable price when you take into account the rotating stone.

Gozney

Gozney Roccbox for $499: When Adrienne So first reviewed the dual-fuel Gozney Roccbox, she praised the fast recovery time that has made the Roccbox popular among pizza pop-up chefs, allowing her to make 10 pies in less than 30 minutes when cooking pizza with propane. That said, few home pizza makers need such throughput, and the 44-pound device is heavier than other competitors. The optional woodbox was oppressively difficult to use, for those who want the ability to cook with fire. But the Gozney’s price, previously among the most expensive entrants, now seems downright reasonable. And Matthew Korfhage’s experience using the default propane option has been good, with terrific temperature stability.

Ooni Karu, First Edition for $349: Ooni is still selling the previous generation oven of WIRED’s top pick, the Karu 2, for about $100 less. Like other Ooni pizza ovens, OG Karu is an excellent oven—light, portable, and easy to clean—and WIRED reviewer Adrienne So couldn’t stop using the thing after first testing it. Nonetheless the newer Karu 2 heats more evenly, and holds more fuel than the first-generation oven.

Ooni Koda 12 for $399: The original Ooni Koda 12 is a mere 21 pounds, making it the most light and portable Koda. Its thin, powder-coated steel shell insulates well enough that it remains cool to the touch, even when the fire is burning. Just slide in the baking stone, screw on the propane tank, and you’re ready to go. The door fits 12-inch pizza peels and 10-inch cast-iron skillets. However, you should not store it outside.

Photograph: Breville

Breville Pizzaiolo for $800: The Breville Pizzaiolo was our prior top-pick electric pizza oven, and like a lot of Breville devices it offers beauteous ease of use and admirable technological sophistication, with three separate heating elements and two sensors that make sure each part of your pie is perfectly cooked. Where the first-generation Ooni Volt edged it out was with better insulation, a higher max temperature, and more versatility for cooking other things besides pizza. Note, however, that the Volt will soon be fully phased out for the second-generation Volt 2, which follows Breville’s lead in moving toward greater automation.

Cuisinart 3-in-1 Propel Pizza Oven and Grill for $600: This Cuisinart Propel 3-in-1 offers an ingenious design. It’s a four-burner stand-up grill and griddle that’s perfectly good for burgers or pancakes—but with a pizza stone and mount, and a domed pizza lid. A smoked-glass door and temperature gauge lets you monitor your pie and turn your pizza without losing all the heat, while the side griddle means you can even cook toppings or sauces on the same device, without having to wander inside and outside. The extra workspace offered by the side tables is likewise truly welcome. But there are trade-offs to this versatility. You can heat your stone above 900 degrees Fahrenheit without trouble, but you won’t get reliable ambient baking temps above 750. And so there’s a bit of a learning curve. You’ll want to turn your middle burners down but leave the side burners on, to cook something between a New York pie and a Neapolitan. The build’s also a little clattery, and the poorly made burner knobs have an irritating habit of slipping on their pegs. This last flaw knocked this oven down to our honorable mentions, despite the Propel’s cleverness and versatility.

Photograph: Adrienne So

Ninja Wood-Fired Oven for $300: If you’re looking for a remarkably sturdy and versatile outdoor oven, this is a pretty good pick with a top temperature of 700 degrees Fahrenheit. The door is a little sticky, which makes baking pizza at high heat a little tricky, but if you want one device that can do everything from smoking a pork shoulder to making muffins to bake a pizza pie, this is your pick.

The Piezano for $100: This TikTok-popular oven is affordable, small, and convenient. It looks a little like a waffle iron, and comes with handy double paddles for easier placement. Astonishingly, its claims of heating the top and bottom elements to 800 degrees Fahrenheit are accurate, and it takes about 15 minutes, which allows for short cook times. But note the heating element at the top doesn’t cover the whole surface area, so you have to rotate your pies pretty frequently. Also, opening the top like a waffle maker means that it doesn’t retain heat very well. It dropped by 100 to 200 degrees between pies and requires a bit of recovery time.

Also Tested

Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

Current Backyard Model P for $699: No less a TV food personage than Alton Brown has signed on as an endorser of this 1,750-watt electric indoor/outdoor pizza oven, which will heat to 850 degrees Fahrenheit using a standard power outlet. Heat is relatively even across the oven, and it’ll get up to top temp in around 30 minutes. But cook settings are constrained to a few preset levels (New-York style, thin crust, Neapolitan, frozen), whose temps and cooking times can be a bit fussy to fiddle with. The app and on-device controls tend to offer more quirks than functionality. Display temp and actual temp don’t always match, and its top thermal elements turn on and off like the lights in a David Lynch movie, according to what the company calls a proprietary algorithm. Still, you can make a great pizza on this thing, and you can make it indoors. Current says it plans to add more functions and cooking modes in future updates, and we’ll keep testing. But it feels less than fully baked at the moment, especially at its price.

Pizzacraft Pizzaque for $130: This oven is adorable and affordable, and you can stand it in your driveway and cook a good pizza while sitting in your camp chair. However, it just doesn’t get as hot or cook as evenly as a better-insulated oven does.

The Best Accessories

Some pizza ovens provide you with proprietary accessories to set you on your pizza path. But we’ve also found a few extras to be helpful along the way:

A handheld infrared thermometer for $11: Even if the oven has a built-in thermometer, a handheld infrared thermometer is a great way to check the temperature on different areas of the pizza stone. It’s also important to make sure the stone has time to reheat after each pizza. For pizza purposes, this affordable one should be accurate enough to suit your needs.

A wooden pizza peel for $34: If you own multiple peels, it’s quick and easy to prep one pizza while another is baking. WIRED reviewers Adrienne So and Matthew Korfhage each own several peels, including a useful small turning peel. But for launching, the dough is much less likely to stick on a wooden peel, especially if you first sprinkle on some semolina or flour.

A cast-iron skillet for $25: You can also use a cast-iron pan in your pizza oven to sear steaks or pan-roast broccoli. Lodge’s pans work just as well as much more expensive options.

Heat-resistant gloves for $20: That cast iron gets extremely hot, so you’ll also need a good pair of mitts. (Even these won’t protect your hands for long, so you’ll need a place near the oven to set the pan down.)

Fire starters for $20: If you’ve ever been intimidated by the idea of cooking with wood, don’t be! These fire starters make it quick and simple. Just light the end with a match, drop it in the fuel tray, and line up a few oak sticks on top. Be sure to keep your wood dry if you don’t want to create a smoke stack in your backyard.

Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that’s too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.

Scientists have devised a way to create a green alternative to the light-emitting materials often used in TV, smartphones and other display technologies.

The research, led by a team at the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University in the US and involving Nottingham Trent University, aimed to address the challenge of “photoluminescent” solid-state materials, which often rely on non-renewable resources and toxic metals.

These materials are also often made in multi-step processes that produce a lot of chemical waste which can be hazardous.

The study is published in the journal Chem.

Photoluminescent solid-state materials work by absorbing UV light and re-emitting it as visible light, providing an ability to glow which makes them ideal for a range of applications such as display technologies, lighting, sensors, security inks, biomedical imaging through to glow-in-the-dark toys.

The challenge for researchers has been to develop these materials from sustainable sources that are environmentally-friendly and in a way that is less wasteful and less hazardous.

As part of the study, the team took lignin—a by-product of the wood pulping and paper industry and a natural substance found between and in the cell walls of plants and trees—and combined it with histidine, a simple amino acid, finding they could produce a range of solid-state materials that fluoresce under UV light.

In addition to easily tunable photoluminescent material properties, the preparation of the materials only uses green solvents in the form of water and acetone.

The fluorescence, or lighting, effect relies on specific parts of the lignin—”phenolic groups”—which become energized when they absorb the light.

In this energized state, they release protons to the histidine in the solid structure, a process known as “excited state proton transfer” (ESPT).

As the lignin relaxes back to its normal state, it releases light which can shine at room temperature. In some cases, the materials continued to glow very briefly even after the UV light was turned off.

“The concept of ESPT isn’t new, it is well known in pure phenolic molecules,” said first author Dr. Ho-Yin Tse, a researcher from the Center for Green Chemistry and Green Engineering at Yale University.

“But what is interesting is that lignin’s natural phenolic structures—present throughout the macromolecule—can inherently support this kind of photoacid behavior and this effect has rarely been examined in this context.”

“This is an excellent example of green and sustainable chemistry,” said study co-author Dr. Darren Lee, a researcher in sustainable chemistry in Nottingham Trent University’s School of Science and Technology.

He said, “Photoluminescent materials are vital for a range of everyday and smart technologies, but most rely on toxic metals and non-renewable resources.

“In this study we not only simplified the synthesis of these materials but also utilized abundant waste streams to produce tunable materials in a safer way.”

“Computational modeling revealed how molecular interactions between lignin and histidine enable this unique light-driven proton transfer,” said Dr. Chi-Shun Yeung, who led the computational analysis at The University of Hong Kong.

“These mechanistic insights explain how biopolymers can achieve efficient light emission without relying on metals.”

In 2011, Deconinck and Oliveras simulated different disturbances with higher and higher frequencies and watched what happened to the Stokes waves. As they expected, for disturbances above a certain frequency, the waves persevered.

But as the pair continued to dial up the frequency, they suddenly began to see destruction again. At first, Oliveras worried that there was a bug in the computer program. “Part of me was like, this can’t be right,” she said. “But the more I dug, the more it persisted.”

In fact, as the frequency of the disturbance increased, an alternating pattern emerged. First there was an interval of frequencies where the waves became unstable. This was followed by an interval of stability, which was followed by yet another interval of instability, and so on.

Deconinck and Oliveras published their finding as a counterintuitive conjecture: that this archipelago of instabilities stretches off to infinity. They called all the unstable intervals “isole”—the Italian word for “islands.”

It was strange. The pair had no explanation for why instabilities would appear again, let alone infinitely many times. They at least wanted a proof that their startling observation was correct.

Bernard Deconinck and Katie Oliveras uncovered a strange pattern in computational studies of wave stability.

Photograph: Courtesy of Bernard Deconinck

Photograph: Courtesy of Katie Oliveras

For years, no one could make any progress. Then, at the 2019 workshop, Deconinck approached Maspero and his team. He knew they had a lot of experience studying the math of wavelike phenomena in quantum physics. Perhaps they could figure out a way to prove that these striking patterns arise from the Euler equations.

The Italian group got to work immediately. They started with the lowest set of frequencies that seemed to cause waves to die. First, they applied techniques from physics to represent each of these low-frequency instabilities as arrays, or matrices, of 16 numbers. These numbers encoded how the instability would grow and distort the Stokes waves over time. The mathematicians realized that if one of the numbers in the matrix was always zero, the instability would not grow, and the waves would live on. If the number was positive, the instability would grow and eventually destroy the waves.

To show that this number was positive for the first batch of instabilities, the mathematicians had to compute a gigantic sum. It took 45 pages and nearly a year of work to solve it. Once they’d done so, they turned their attention to the infinitely many intervals of higher-frequency wave-killing disturbances—the isole.

First, they figured out a general formula—another complicated sum—that would give them the number they needed for each isola. Then they used a computer program to solve the formula for the first 21 isole. (After that, the calculations got too complicated for the computer to handle.) The numbers were all positive, as expected—and they also seemed to follow a simple pattern that implied they would be positive for all the other isole as well.