Pizza is the one food that it’s pretty safe to say you can never get sick of. One of the best ways to enjoy homemade pizza is with an outdoor pizza oven. Outdoor ovens are superior to cooking pizzas indoors because the typical indoor oven maxes out at around 500-500 degrees. If you want to make true Neapolitan-style pizza, you need to get your temperatures over 900 degrees, allowing you to get that crisp, spotted crust and the puffy, moist interior that is the benchmark for truly great pizza crust.

That’s what makes outdoor pizza ovens so great. In recent years, dozens of manufacturers have been making portable pizza ovens with the promise of producing a true Neapolitan-style pizza in your backyard. The great thing about this is it eliminates the expense of having to make a large, full-scale stone pizza oven.

The best outdoor ovens are compact, reliable, reasonably priced and easy to use. With that in mind, today we want to share with you a few of our favorite outdoor portable pizza ovens.

Ooni Koda Outdoor Pizza Maker

This is an incredible little oven with simple, reliable operation. It consistently hits wood-fired-oven temperatures and maintains them for as long as you are cooking, with no fussing or babysitting, which means you can spend more time enjoying pizza with your friends and family and less time coddling a temperamental flame. It’s attractive, solidly built, weatherproof, and portable.

This is a heavily insulated unit. It’s a stainless-steel-and-stone box with a rubberized exterior. You can place it on any surface, including wood or plastic, and it stands up on three heavy-duty folding legs. 

Once it’s fired up, the flame rises up the back of the chamber and gets directed across the top of the oven. The stone floor heats indirectly via hot air and radiation from above. After a half-hour or so, both the dome and the floor of the oven can hit temperatures above 900°F, allowing you to cook pizzas in under 90 seconds.

The best feature of this oven is it’s not just for pizzas. You can use this pizza oven to roast meat, fish, and vegetables

Ooni 3 Outdoor Pizza Maker

Backyard-pizza enthusiasts who enjoy working with live fire, including all the joys and headaches involved, will love this pizza maker that turns out truly wood-fired Neapolitan pizza.

The Ooni is a compact oven that was the first of its kind on the market several years ago, pairing portability and compactness with some serious heat output. The stainless steel box houses a heat deflector and a stone floor. You light up a pile of wood pellets in a little tray in the back of the unit, then load more wood pellets into a metal hopper, which continuously feeds them into the fire via gravity. As the pellets burn, the flame is drawn over the stone, across the top of the oven, and out a tall chimney in the front.

With a good fire in there, you can preheat that stone to over 750°F in just about 15 minutes, with air temperatures rising above 900°F.

When you’re ready to cook, simply open the door and slide the pizza in. Turn your pizza every 20-30 seconds, and in 90 seconds or less, your pizza is done. Crisp, charred, and puffy.

Roccbox Outdoor Pizza Oven

The Roccbox is simply amazing. It retains heat well enough to bake pizza after pizza, at less than two minutes a pie.

It has a few delightful features that make it particularly easy to set up as a propane oven. First, the oven’s stone baking surface is secured on the oven floor. You don’t have to remove a charred, loose stone to move it or worry about it slipping out of the oven and breaking.

Second, it comes with a padded handle. Just Velcro the wide strap around the oven’s body and move it as needed. Finally, the wood and gas attachments don’t require complicated assembly. Both use a simple, secure bayonet mount on the bottom of the oven. Just turn the oven over, insert the pegs into the holes, and slide to click it on.

Once you’ve hooked up your chosen fuel attachment (wood or propane), unfold the Roccbox’s jointed, stainless steel legs and fire it up. The Roccbox’s body is made from a dense, insulating calcium silicate, covered by a thin, soft, silicone jacket. The flame rises from the back of the oven and flows over the top of the pizza, heating the body of the oven and its floor.

PizzaCraft Pizzeria Pronto Portable Outdoor Oven

For those looking for a very affordable option for outdoor pizza ovens, the PizzaCraft Pronto Portable Oven may be just what you are looking for. While the Pizzacraft Pizzeria Pronto won’t produce pizza much faster or better than your indoor oven, it is a good choice for those who want to bring the baking experience outdoors in an easy-to-operate setup.

A ring-shaped gas burner heats up a double layer of pizza stones from underneath. The two stones are designed to eliminate hot and cool spots for a more even bake. Space all around the stones allows the heat to rise and curl over the tops of the pizzas via a perforated metal reflector.

The oven is designed to be easy to use, and on that front, it delivers. There are no frills. You just put it together, hook it up to your gas tank, turn it on, and it’s ready to cook within half an hour or so. It’s weatherproof, so you don’t need to worry about leaving it exposed in your backyard to the elements.

Kettle Pizza

KettlePizza makes grilling accessories so that you could make restaurant-quality pizza in your backyard for cheap, with some very basic accessories that work with your Weber grill. KettlePizza, named after the kettle-style grill it works with, is very popular.

Essentially what you’re doing with the KettlePizza insert is making an alteration to your charcoal grill so that it can get up to a higher temperature. Normally, using just charcoal, your grill will cook at between 300ºF – 500ºF.

While this can cook a pizza in about 20 minutes, it’s not “Neapolitan style” cooking that you get with a wood-fired pizza oven. Not only that, you only get charcoal smoke, instead of wood smoke, which is what’s going to flavor the dough as we cook.

For those that want to make backyard pizza, this is a very inexpensive way to get a good unit that will get the job done.


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