We independently review everything we recommend. When you buy through our links, we may earn a commission. Learn more›
We tested the Volt, Ooni’s electric pizza oven, and added it to the competition. All of our picks remain the same. Solo Pizza Oven
A pizza oven is not an essential item, but it sure is fun to use.
It can also do something that your home oven cannot: reach the blistering-hot temperatures required to bake up the perfect pie.
If you’re really into making the best possible pizza at home, the Ooni Koda 16 Gas Powered Pizza Oven is a great portable oven that can help you reach that goal.
After baking nearly 100 pizzas in four outdoor pizza ovens and two indoor countertop ovens, we like the Ooni Koda 16 the best because it has the biggest baking surface of all the models we tested, and it offers superior heat distribution.
This portable outdoor pizza oven lights up with the turn of a dial, and it can bake an obscene number of pizzas on one tank of gas.
Small but mighty (and blazing-hot), this wood-pellet pizza oven bakes perfect pizzas with a hint of smokiness.
This oven fully preheats in 15 minutes, and it can cook a pizza in just over 90 seconds. It’s the Ferrari of countertop ovens: sleek, expensive, and fast.
This portable outdoor pizza oven lights up with the turn of a dial, and it can bake an obscene number of pizzas on one tank of gas.
The Ooni Koda 16 Gas Powered Pizza Oven is the most convenient and user-friendly portable outdoor pizza oven we tested, and it also bakes up a stellar pie. Of all the ovens we tested, this 16-inch, propane-fueled oven had the largest baking surface, so there was more maneuverability for launching, rotating, and moving the pizza as it baked. During our tests, we got the Koda 16 up to 890 °F, which was more than hot enough to bake up a crispy, bubbling pie. The Koda 16 is an expensive, specialized cooking appliance, but for anyone focused on making great pizza, it works better than using a stone on a standard grill. And this pizza oven is versatile and easy to use, so it’s a great value compared with its competitors. If you want to save some money on a propane-fueled oven, and you don’t mind sacrificing oven capacity, we think the smaller Ooni Koda 12 Gas Powered Pizza Oven (which usually costs about $200 less than the Koda 16) may serve you well; we haven’t tested this model, though.
Small but mighty (and blazing-hot), this wood-pellet pizza oven bakes perfect pizzas with a hint of smokiness.
If you want to pay a little less, or you like being more hands-on with your fuel and want just a touch of smoky flavor (and you don’t mind dealing with a few quirks), the wood-pellet-fired Ooni Fyra 12 Wood Pellet Pizza Oven is a good choice. The Fyra 12 gets just as hot and bakes up the same quality pizzas as the Koda 16, but it’s typically about $250 cheaper—and smaller, lighter, and smokier. Instead of propane, the Fyra 12 uses wood pellets (the same ones that fuel pellet grills).
Compared with the Koda 16, the Fyra 12 has a smaller stone and oven opening, so it feels a little more cramped for rotating your pizza while it cooks. And, as mentioned above, the Fyra 12 has its quirks: The hopper can be prone to jams, and it’s normal for flames to shoot out the back of the firebox when you remove the door to launch or rotate a pizza. All that said, it was much easier to get (and keep) a fire going in the Fyra 12 than in the hardwood or lump-charcoal ovens we tested. So the Fyra 12 is a solid wood-fired pizza oven for the price.
This oven fully preheats in 15 minutes, and it can cook a pizza in just over 90 seconds. It’s the Ferrari of countertop ovens: sleek, expensive, and fast.
The Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo is designed and built for one thing: baking pizza. And it does that very well, reaching temperatures of up to 750 °F, which is way hotter than a home oven can get. Unlike our portable oven picks, which are intended for use in the backyard, the Pizzaiolo is an indoor countertop appliance that’s loaded with preset cooking functions. It also has precise temperature control, a timer, and included accessories (a metal peel and a deep-dish pizza pan with a detachable handle). Since it normally costs about $400 more than the Ooni Koda 16, the Pizzaiolo oven is a pricey specific-use appliance. But if you’re really into making awesome pizza at home, and you don’t want an outdoor oven, this is a great option.
Before I became a journalist, I was a cook for almost a decade. And for two and a half years, I spent 10 hours a day maintaining the wood-fired grill at a restaurant. To this day I still love cooking with fire.
As a senior staff writer for Wirecutter, I’ve been writing about kitchen gear for almost eight years. Between testing and researching for this guide, as well as working on our reviews of pizza stones and the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo, I’ve made over 100 pizzas.
Until recently, if you wanted an oven that could get hot enough to bake a pizzeria-quality pie, you had to shell out thousands of dollars and set aside space for a brick oven. But that’s not the case anymore. Countertop ovens and portable outdoor models are less expensive, and they don’t require permanent residence in your kitchen or on your patio. These models make better homemade pizza attainable for more folks.
We’ve tested the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo and the Ooni Volt 12 Electric Pizza Oven. Both are electric pizza ovens that can ostensibly be used indoors or outdoors (though we don’t recommend storing them outdoors). Of the two, we recommend the Breville Pizzaiolo. It’s well designed and packed with features. And, due to its great heat control, it excels at its primary function: baking really good homemade pizza. We recommend this oven if you don’t have the patio or yard space for an outdoor oven.
These ovens are precisely what the name implies: They’re small, standalone models that can reach the stratospheric temperatures—upwards of 900 °F—needed to bake up a Neapolitan-style pie. These pizza ovens can range in price from around $250 to $600 and up. No matter the manufacturer, most portable pizza ovens have similar bones. Most models have a low profile, are wide, are outfitted with a cordierite baking stone (cordierite is a type of ceramic often used to make unglazed pizza stones), and sit on three legs. Fueled by either propane, wood pellets, hardwood, or charcoal, these ovens pump a lot of heat into a short, wide cavity, and the result is a crazy-hot, speedy pizza cooker. Even though they’re called portable, they still weigh 30 to 45 pounds, which is something to consider if storing or moving them may be an issue. But if you have the outdoor space, they’re a more versatile option than our Breville oven pick, thanks to their larger opening, and they tend to cost a lot less.
A pizza oven is rarely an essential item. However, if you’re really into making the best possible pizza at home, but you don’t have the budget or space for a backyard brick oven, you might want to get one. And if you’re ready to up your homemade-pizza game, a pizza oven will definitely help you do that.
If you’ve ever tried cooking a pizza in your home oven—even with a pizza stone—the resulting pie probably lacked that perfect balance of crispy-and-chewy-yet-tender, which the best pizzerias seem to achieve effortlessly. That’s because home ovens top out at 500 °F (maybe 550 °F, if you’re lucky). And that’s not hot enough to bake a pizza completely without the crust drying out. However, by cooking your pizza between 750 °F and 800 °F for a couple of minutes, you’ll get a pie with puffy edges, leopard-spotted crust, and steamy melted cheese.
These ovens are not magic machines that will turn you into an expert pizzaiolo overnight. A super-hot oven is simply the last crucial step toward creating excellent homemade pizza. As many folks reading this may know, your dough (recipe and technique), sauce, and toppings can be just as important as your heat source. And getting it all right takes practice. A couple of my favorite resources include Peter Reinhart’s American Pie: My Search for the Perfect Pizza and NYT Cooking’s How to Make Pizza.
All of our picks are more than capable of baking excellent pizza. The trick is finding the best oven that works for your space and budget. Portable pizza ovens are a better value and more versatile than the indoor electric ones, if you have adequate outdoor space that allows for at least 3 feet of clearance around all sides of the oven. However, our indoor pick, the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo, is loaded with preset cooking functions, making it especially easy to use. And it fits on a kitchen countertop—no patio needed.
Here are the factors we considered when looking for the best portable pizza ovens:
This had the absolute biggest impact on ease of use. For fuel, outdoor portable pizza ovens use either propane, wood pellets, hardwood, or charcoal (or some combination of two or more of these), while indoor models run on electricity. We baked excellent pizzas in most of the ovens we tested. But we had to work harder to do so in some ovens than in others.
Among the outdoor ovens we tested, we found that propane-fueled models heat at the most consistent pace, as long as there’s gas in the tank. The same was true for the wood-pellet oven we tested: If you keep the hopper full (and flowing), you’ll have consistent heat. We preferred the propane models because they let us focus on baking the best possible pizza. The same can be said for our electric countertop pick, the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo, if you need to go the indoor route.
Ovens with wider openings make it easier for you to launch your pie and rotate it as it cooks. You must rotate your pizza mid-bake, so that it emerges from the oven with an evenly browned and crispy crust. And you have to work fast, because an 800 ºF oven cooks pizza in about two minutes. Compared with a wider oven opening, a narrower one doesn’t give you as much mobility to move and twist your baking pie. The size of the baking surface is also an important factor: A 16-inch oven will give you more space to work with than a 12-inch model.
Most importantly, you want a removable stone so that you can clean under and around it from time to time. Each pizza leaves burnt bits of flour or cornmeal on the stone after you remove it from the oven. And you need to get rid of that detritus so it doesn’t make your subsequent pies taste like an old fireplace.
Pellet, hardwood, and charcoal models do need a little extra care when it comes to cleaning, since they have chimney pipes where soot can build up. You can burn off excess chimney soot by running the oven extra-hot for 15 to 20 minutes.
Portable pizza ovens are a new appliance for most folks, so we think instruction manuals are very important. The manuals for the models we tested incorporated a lot of illustrations and sleek layouts that made them navigable. But the most important information—safety and fire management—was packed in the front, in small type. It’s easy to glide right past that section, but we recommend you read (and reread!) the safety guidelines. For instance, the Ooni Fyra’s manual is where you’ll find the warning not to use that model in windy conditions.
The main accessory you need when using these ovens is a pizza peel (video), but not all pizza ovens come with a peel in the box. As is the case with our two Ooni oven picks, pizza peels are sometimes sold as extra accessories. This is a little annoying, but it’s not a dealbreaker for us. For example, we don’t expect a grill to include tongs and a spatula. However, it’s nice when a pizza oven does include a peel. That’s because many of these pizza ovens have small openings that require peels measuring no wider than 12 inches; by contrast, grills work with almost any grilling tool.
We tested the outdoor ovens between December and March in New York City. We took note of how long they took to heat and how much fuel they used. None of the outdoor pizza ovens reached their peak advertised temperatures during that time, but it was cold outside, and there’s only so much these little things can do. That said, all of the ovens we tested reached more-than-sufficient temperatures needed to cook delicious pizzas, even in below- and near-freezing conditions.
I made pizzas using the same dough ratio, sauce recipe, and toppings as when we were testing baking stones. This provided consistency across all of our pizza testing. I cooked the pizzas once the stone reached anywhere between 750 °F and 850 °F, observing the general heat zones in each oven and identifying hot spots. I also noted how the size of the stones and oven openings made it easier or harder to rotate and move the pies as they baked.
As a bonus treat (for me), I cooked extra things in some ovens as the workday came to a close and I had dinner on the brain. I made oysters Rockefeller in the Ooni Koda 16 Gas Powered Pizza Oven for Christmas Eve dinner and roasted skin-on salmon and cauliflower in the Ooni Fyra 12 Wood Pellet Pizza Oven—all with great success. I like that these portable pizza ovens can do more than just, you know, cook pizza.
This portable outdoor pizza oven lights up with the turn of a dial, and it can bake an obscene number of pizzas on one tank of gas.
If you want a convenient, portable outdoor pizza oven—one that ignites and heats up with the turn of a dial—the Ooni Koda 16 Gas Powered Pizza Oven is your best bet. This propane-fueled pizza oven is the easiest to use and the largest of all the ones we tested. With a square, 16¾-inch cordierite-ceramic baking surface and a roomy, 21-by-4½-inch opening, the Koda 16 provided ample room for launching pies, as well as rotating and moving them around the oven as they baked.
It reaches scorching temperatures. Ooni claims the Koda 16 can reach 932 °F, and in our tests it came close. The maximum temperature we measured on the stone was 890 °F, which was still impressive—and definitely hot enough to torch a pizza. (Also keep in mind that we tested this oven in the dead of winter in Brooklyn, New York.)
The Ooni Koda is consistent. It reliably outperformed all of the outdoor ovens we tested, even in pretty harsh weather conditions: below-freezing temperatures, moderate wind, and even light snowfall (in a covered area). Its L-shaped burner runs along the left and rear sides of the oven, providing a unique heat map compared with that of the competition (other models fired the oven only from the back). The Koda 16 was hottest in the left-rear corner, and it gradually got cooler as we moved diagonally across the surface to the front-right corner. The other models were hottest in the back and coolest in the front.
The Koda 16 is big (for a portable pizza oven). Its larger cooking surface and opening not only let you make bigger pies but also afford you more maneuverability inside the oven. Its square baking stone measures 16¾ inches, an average of 3½ inches wider and deeper than those in the other models we tested. On paper that may not seem like a lot, but in practice those extra inches give you a lot more room to rotate and move your pizza to achieve an even bake. The other ovens were just a little cramped inside, and that made us appreciate the extra wiggle room the Koda 16 provided.
It's also great for making more than just pizza. As a fun personal experiment, for Christmas Eve dinner I made a dozen oysters Rockefeller in the Koda 16. I baked two batches of six oysters on rock-salt-lined restaurant sizzle platters (I knew these could handle the heat of the Koda 16 because they’re intended for use in a professional salamander broiler). The resulting oysters were browned on top and bubbling hot under the cheesy crust. No other cooking appliance in my kitchen could’ve come close to delivering such a stellar dish.
The Koda 16 is a cinch to fire up. The Koda 16 uses 30-pound liquid-propane tanks, which you can find at most hardware stores. To light the oven, make sure the valve on the propane tank is open all the way; then turn the dial on the right-hand side of the oven until you hear it click. If you don’t see a flame, turn the dial back off, and repeat the process until you see the ports ignite.
This oven gets very hot very fast. For heaven’s sake, do not stick your face in the oven! You’ll know it’s lit from a safe distance. Not to get all parental on y’all, but it bears repeating that this thing gets extremely hot. The first time I used the Koda 16, I melted part of my puffer jacket on the oven roof and—wait for it—stuck my face too close to the opening and singed my eyelashes. Don’t be me.
As far as fuel consumption goes, Ooni states on its website that the Koda 16 burns through 1.3 pounds of propane per hour of use; in our experience, this seems about right.
The Koda 16 comes in two sizes. Ooni also makes the Ooni Koda 12 Gas Powered Pizza Oven, a smaller and less-expensive version of this pizza oven. The Koda 12 is roughly the same size as the other Ooni ovens we tested, the Fyra 12 and the Karu 12. Compared with the Koda 16, the Koda 12 has burners along the back end only; there are none on the left-hand side, which makes sense to us—the Koda 12 is smaller, and more burners would probably be overkill.
The Koda 16 is hefty. The word portable is accurate for this oven, in that it’s not built into your patio. But at 40 pounds, the Koda 16 is pretty heavy, and its wide shape makes the oven awkward to carry. You don’t want to lug it around on a long walk. But it’s still good for backyards and chill outings, such as tailgating and car camping—basically any situation where you don’t have to carry it too far.
It’s the most expensive portable outdoor pizza oven we tested. We understand that this is a lot to spend on a niche cooking appliance. But the Koda 16 is nearly half the price of the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo. And it’s a little more versatile, in that it has a larger oven cavity that gives you more room to cook things other than pizza. If you want a more affordable option—one that gets just as hot but comes with its own set of quirks—check out our budget pick, the wood-pellet-burning Ooni Fyra. (Also, although we haven’t tested the Ooni Koda 12, you might consider it, since it’s a smaller version of the Koda 16 and usually costs around $400.)
Accessories are not included. This is true for both of our Ooni picks. However, since the Koda 16 costs more, know that you may have to spend more before you have everything you need, like a wooden peel for firing your pies and a thin metal peel for retrieving them. Ooni does sell peels, covers, and just about any other pizza-adjacent tool on its website, but Ooni’s accessories are frequently out of stock. They also cost more than non-Ooni versions, which (except for the oven covers) are often easy to buy elsewhere.
Small but mighty (and blazing-hot), this wood-pellet pizza oven bakes perfect pizzas with a hint of smokiness.
The Ooni Fyra 12 Wood Pellet Pizza Oven is an excellent choice if you don’t want to plunk down $600 on a niche cooking appliance. Fueled by wood pellets, the Fyra 12 gets just as hot and makes the same quality pizzas as our top pick, and it’s also smaller, lighter, and less expensive. The Fyra has a 13¼-inch square cooking surface and a 13-by-20-inch footprint. If you have limited outdoor space, or you just don’t want to commit to a larger model, this little oven is fun and capable of baking some awesome pies. But this fireball does come with some quirks that make it trickier to use than the propane-fueled Ooni Koda 16.
The Fyra 12 oven was the only wood-pellet model we tested. Wood pellets light quickly and burn hot, and we found that while pellets aren’t as convenient a fuel as propane, they’re much handier than charcoal or hardwood. You can find pellets online and at most hardware stores that stock grilling accessories. Be sure to look for pellets made from 100% hardwood, with no fillers or additives.
Controlling the fire takes a bit of practice. Compared with our top pick, the Fyra 12 requires more attention to fuel and fire maintenance—enough for us to add a section, below, expanding on the user manual, with a few extra tips we learned in testing. The Fyra 12 is the best value of all the ovens we tried, but it comes with its own unique quirks. For starters, the airflow reverses inside the oven when you remove the door, causing flames to shoot out the back. As the manual explains, this is totally normal for this model, and it’s a strong visual reminder that you should keep the Fyra 12 (and any other portable pizza oven, for that matter) away from anything flammable. The Fyra 12 shouldn’t be operated in windy conditions; that push of air into the firebox can stoke the flame and cause the fire to get too big. If you live in an area prone to high winds, consider our top pick, the Ooni Koda 16.
Another quirk of the Fyra 12: the hopper jams. Each time we used the Fyra 12 oven, no matter how much we tried to avoid it, the hopper either jammed or failed to feed the fire naturally at least once. As of now, we still don’t know why the hopper jams—we just know that it’s both a fact of life and easily fixable (see the section below, on expanding on the user manual).
The Fyra 12 is overall smaller than the Koda 16. That means the Fyra 12 takes up less space, but it accommodates smaller pizzas than our top pick does. And the Fyra 12 has a smaller opening than the Koda 16; it can feel a little cramped when you’re trying to rotate and maneuver pizzas as they bake. While this isn’t an impossible task in the Fyra 12, it just takes some practice as you learn your way around the oven.
You can cook other foods in the Fyra 12, too. As with the Koda 16, with the Fyra 12 I cooked a couple of bonus dishes, this time roasted cauliflower and skin-on salmon. It’s important to note that I wouldn’t cook anything but pizza and other breads directly on the baking stone. Luckily for me, I have a small, oval cast-iron roaster that fits perfectly in these low-profile ovens. The salmon emerged from the Fyra 12 with tender flesh and crispy, blistered skin—perfection.
The Fyra 12 costs a little more to fuel than the Koda 16. We estimate that the Fyra 12 consumes about 1½ pounds of pellets every 15 minutes (one hopperful); at the price we paid for pellets, it worked out to roughly $2.56 per hour of fuel. By comparison, the Koda 16 cost us about $1.90 per hour to heat. That said, the price difference between the pricier Koda 16 and the Fyra 12 is equivalent to about 100 hours’ worth of pellets.
Starting the Ooni Fyra 12 takes some getting used to. The manual says to start with two handfuls of pellets in the firebox. I used one scoopful from the aforementioned chimney cap that comes with the oven. Then the manual instructed me to place one “all-natural firestarter” on top of the pellets and ignite with a lighter. I couldn’t find an all-natural fire starter that I trusted to be food-safe, and the Ooni starters are often sold out, so I used a propane torch. (Since then, I’ve found a fire starter comparable to Ooni’s that should work.) After this first batch is fully ignited, the manual says to “top off little and often” with more pellets, to let the fire build gradually (as well as to avoid snuffing it out). Okay, but what does “little and often” mean? After a couple of runs, I learned that it means adding one scoop about every two minutes until the hopper is full.
Sometimes the wood pellets in the hopper can swell and get stuck inside. Hopper jams are a bummer if you catch them too late and your fire dies down. The Fyra 12 manual doesn’t address what to do in the event of a hopper jam. An Ooni customer service representative advised us via email to “use your pellet...scoop to give the top of your pellet hopper a good tap” after each addition of pellets. “This will avoid any jamming” and “help ‘stoke the fire’ so to speak,” they wrote. But that didn’t always do the trick for me. Against the manual’s advice, while testing the Fyra 12 I dealt with a couple of stubborn hopper jams by using a long metallic tool to physically push the pellets down into the firebox. (This isn’t by any means a recommendation; I’m just saying that’s what I did.)
This oven fully preheats in 15 minutes, and it can cook a pizza in just over 90 seconds. It’s the Ferrari of countertop ovens: sleek, expensive, and fast.
If you don’t have outdoor space for a portable pizza oven, the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo bakes pizzas just as well as our other picks, but it does so from your kitchen countertop. Thanks to pre-programmed functions that automatically set the time and temperature for almost any type of pizza, this oven takes most of the guesswork out of baking the perfect pie. And since it runs on electricity—not on propane or wood pellets, as our outdoor picks do—you can crank out as many pizzas as you want, without fearing that you’ll run out of fuel. But this oven is twice the price of our top portable pizza oven pick, so it’s an expensive single-purpose appliance.
The Pizzaiolo oven doesn’t get as hot as our other picks, but that’s okay. This pizza oven tops out at 750 °F; that’s about 100 degrees cooler than the temperatures we measured in the Ooni Koda 16 and Fyra 12 models. That said, the Pizzaiolo oven bakes up a pretty perfect pizza, and it takes only 15 minutes to preheat. That’s roughly half the time it took our portable picks to come up to temperature (depending on weather conditions).
You can easily bake almost any style of pizza using this oven’s presets. It comes pre-programmed with settings for frozen, pan, New York, thin and crispy, and “wood-fired” (Neapolitan) pizzas. In our tests, we found the settings to be well calibrated, requiring little to no tinkering. We also like that the Pizzaiolo oven includes a seasoned carbon-steel pan for making deep-dish pizzas, thus eliminating the hassle of finding one that fits the cramped oven cavity.
The Pizzaiolo also offers a manual mode. This is a great option for people who like to have complete control. When it’s in manual mode, you determine the deck and top temperatures and the cooking time. It also has a dial that lets you control the level of char on the top crust.
However, this oven isn’t as versatile as our other picks. The small oven cavity is the perfect size for baking a 12-inch pizza and little else, other than flatbreads, like pita and naan. If we’re wary of cooking a fatty piece of meat in a portable outdoor pizza oven, we wouldn’t even attempt that in the Pizzaiolo oven, due to its tendency to emit considerable amounts of smoke at high temperatures. When we ran our tests in 2019, the Pizzaiolo oven set off the smoke alarm twice.
All that said, the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo excels at its sole function: baking stellar homemade pizza. If you have $1,000 burning a hole in your pocket and the extra counter space, this is a fun little fireball of an oven. The Pizzaiolo also comes with a two-year warranty.
Although portable pizza ovens are meant for outdoor use, they’re not impervious to the elements. If possible, store your pizza oven in a garage or shed. And if you don’t have that kind of space, buy a dedicated cover for your pizza oven (or wrap it in a tarp) and store it in a covered area.
Clean in and around the pizza stone occasionally. Remove the stone, wipe it down with a dry rag, and then brush or wipe away all of the stray bits at the bottom of the oven. (I tried using canned air, but other than flinging the debris around inside the oven, it didn’t do much.)
If you have an oven with a chimney (like the Ooni Fyra), you’ll want to check it for soot buildup after every three uses or so. That can be cleaned in a couple of ways. You can run your oven extra-hot for 20 minutes, to burn up extra soot. Or, if you want to give it a good once-over from time to time, wipe out the chimney pipe with a dry rag or some paper towels—though you should understand that this is a dirty job and not at all necessary.
We tested the Ooni Volt 12 Electric Pizza Oven hoping that it would be a solid alternative to the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo. But it fell short in a few ways. The main issue was temperature control. When we were baking pizzas back to back, all of a sudden the third or fourth pizza would come out completely scorched on the bottom, and we hadn’t changed any settings. The Ooni Volt 12 is also very big, measuring 17½ by 21 inches, so you’d need to have a large slab of countertop space to use it in your kitchen. In fact, if you don’t have counter space to accommodate the Volt 12, Ooni makes a table specifically for it. Lastly, the Volt 12 has no preset functions, so it’s less user-friendly than the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo for the same price.
The Ooni Karu 12 Multi-Fuel Pizza Oven runs on hardwood kindling and lump charcoal (either independently or combined). The firebox on the Karu 12 measures 9⅜ by 6 inches and requires wood that’s been cut specifically to fit—6 by 2 inches is ideal. This isn’t a common shape and size for cooking wood. Thankfully, the Karu 12 also burns lump charcoal, which is easier both to light and to fit into the firebox.
While testing, I found that once the oven got up to temperature, I could bake two pizzas before I had to add more fuel. You can probably cook more pizzas between fuel additions in the summer; I was working in 30 °F to 40 °F weather surrounded by snow. I thought the Karu pizzas were fine, but making them took a lot more effort in the Karu 12 than in any other oven we tested.
The Gozney Roccbox isn’t a pick for a few reasons, one of them being that it’s a 12-inch oven that costs as much as the Ooni Koda 16. At 12¼ by 3¼ inches, the Roccbox’s opening is also the smallest of those on all of the ovens we tested, and that made rotating a pizza mid-bake more difficult. Plus, the Roccbox's cordierite baking stone isn’t removable for cleaning. We tested the Roccbox using both the included propane and Gozney’s wood-burner accessory (sold separately, for $100). (We preferred using the propane burner; the wood burner never got the oven hot enough to cook.) Even after an hour and a half of constantly feeding the fire with hardwood, the stone never exceeded 400 °F. Maybe it’s because we tested it during the cold winter months, but we didn’t have that issue with the wood-fired Ooni Karu 12. Our advice is to stick with the Roccbox’s included propane burner for best results.
This article was edited by Marilyn Ong and Marguerite Preston.
Lesley Stockton is a senior staff writer reporting on all things cooking and entertaining for Wirecutter. Her expertise builds on a lifelong career in the culinary world—from a restaurant cook and caterer to a food editor at Martha Stewart. She is perfectly happy to leave all that behind to be a full-time kitchen-gear nerd.
These useful kitchen tools were the most-purchased Wirecutter kitchen picks in 2022.
The Cuisinart Chef’s Convection Toaster Oven is a versatile, powerful mini oven disguised as a toaster.
We compare a countertop oven designed specifically for pizza with a modest baking steel in a home oven.
We think the FibraMent-D Baking Stone is the best all-purpose stone for making crisp pizza, crusty bread, and golden pastries.
Oven For Pizza Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).