Dedicated pizza ovens are all the rage these days, and the popularity of the wood-fired outdoor variety continues to go from strength to strength. Delivering restaurant quality, authentic tasting pizza, traditional outdoor pizza ovens create the perfect environment for cooking pizza – and other foods – in minutes.
The downside of these ovens is that they are large, expensive, slow to heat and can only be used outdoors; not ideal for the usual British weather, or for anyone without a garden. Enter then: the indoor pizza oven. Electric powered, largely inexpensive, quick and convenient to use and store, these nifty kitchen gadgets could be the answer to our Neapolitan pizza prayers.
Achieving high temperatures to cook a perfectly puffed and authentically spotted crust, indoor pizza ovens offer a fast and fuss-free way to enjoy proper Italian-style pizza without having to construct a huge brick oven in your back garden. As they heat up so quickly, standalone pizza ovens also offer a more economical way to cook, and are often suitable for many different foods, aside from pizza.
There aren’t many on the market, but styles and functions do differ, so it makes sense to do your research before investing your hard-earned cash. Consider how often you’ll use the oven; if it’s likely to be for occasional use it probably doesn’t make sense to spend hundreds of pounds on an all-singing all-dancing appliance that’s hard to store, so one of the more basic pizza press style machines may be right for you.
If you just can’t get along with pizza stones (often hard to clean and very hot to handle) then maybe a non-stick style is best – though you’ll lose that stone-baked flavour. Prices can range from £50 to over 10 times that figure for high spec models which offer more functionality, but are more like a full scale appliance rather than an occasional countertop gadget.
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Though pizza ovens can cook all sorts of pizza, from fresh to readymade and frozen, we used the same fresh dough to make our test pizzas, with a variety of toppings. We preheated the ovens as per the manufacturer’s instructions and cooked the pizza for the suggested time. We were looking for ease of use of the machine, for how quickly the ovens heated up and the end result of the pizza. We paid particular attention to the flavour of the crust, how evenly the crust was cooked and whether the toppings were under or overcooked. We deducted marks for too much smoke emanating from the machine – not what you want from an indoor pizza maker – and if the machine was difficult to clean afterwards.
