In pizza heaven, it’s all the time 950 levels. The temperature required to make an genuine Neapolitan pizza is stupidly, unbelievably scorching—extra blast furnace than broiler. My yard pizza oven can get all the way in which there in simply quarter-hour. Crank it to the max, and the Ooni Koda will gurgle up blue flames that bounce off the highest of the dome. In 60 seconds, uncooked dough inflates into pillowy crust, cheese dissolves into the sauce, and some easy elements turn out to be a full-fledged pizza.
Violinists have the Stradivarius. Sneakerheads have the Air Jordan 1. Pizza degenerates like me have the Ooni. I bought my first one three years in the past and have since been on a singular, pointless quest to make the most effective pie potential. Sadly, I’m now somebody who is aware of that dough ought to cross the windowpane check. Don’t get me began on the professionals and cons of Caputo 00 flour.
An at-home pizza oven is a patently absurd factor to purchase. A lot to my spouse’s consternation, I now personal two. It’s all of the extra ridiculous contemplating that I stay in New York Metropolis, the place superb pizzerias are about as simple to identify as rats, and area is a treasured commodity; this isn’t a city that favors single-use kitchen instruments. These units do one factor nicely (pizza) and solely that one factor (pizza). My 12-inch Ooni is among the many most cost-effective and smallest high-heat pizza ovens on the market, and it nonetheless clocks in at $400 and 20 kilos. You will get an 11-in-1 mixture Prompt Pot and air fryer for a fraction of the associated fee.
However by some means, the portable-pizza-oven market is booming. Ooni makes 9 totally different fashions—together with a $900 indoor model that’s like a souped-up toaster oven—and comparable merchandise can be found from firms together with Cuisinart, Ninja, Gozney, and Breville. Oprah included a pizza oven in her 2023 reward information. Florence Pugh has Instagrammed her portable-oven odysseys.
The paradox of pizza has lengthy been this: America’s favourite meals—one which an eighth of the nation eats on any given day—is troublesome, if not inconceivable, to make nicely at dwelling. Not anymore. We’re in the midst of a pizza revolution; there has merely by no means been a greater time to make pizza at dwelling.
The conventional dwelling oven is nice for many issues: chocolate-chip cookies, Thanksgiving turkeys, roasted brussels sprouts, no matter. Pizza will not be one in every of them. Let’s contemplate a traditional New York pie, which doesn’t require the identical excessive warmth as its Neapolitan brethren. It sounds bizarre, however you need the pie to be medium uncommon. The crust must be crispy however nonetheless pliable, the cheese melted however not burned. The one strategy to obtain that’s to blast pizza dough with warmth from each prime and backside—about 600 levels on the very least, ideally 650. However almost each kitchen vary tops out at 550 levels. “By no matter accident of destiny, the extent of warmth that’s needed is simply out of the attain of a typical dwelling oven,” Adam Ragusea, a meals YouTuber who helps open up a pizzeria in suburban Knoxville, Tennessee, instructed me. That temperature discrepancy issues rather a lot. Attempt making pizza on a easy aluminum sheet tray in your house oven, and by the point the crust is golden brown, it’ll be brittle like a cracker and the cheese can have puddled into grease.
Overcoming the restrictions of the reviled kitchen vary has lengthy stumped home made pizza fans. Julia Baby laid out tiles in her oven to absorb the oven’s warmth and switch it to the crust for further crispiness. That impressed the pizza stone, an oversize ceramic tile that you simply insert into your oven. At instances, the human will to make an honest pizza at dwelling borders on farce. Earlier than making pizza, some recipes counsel that you must depart your oven at full warmth for 45 minutes, or an hour, and even two. Within the 2000s, one software program engineer in Atlanta realized that in self-cleaning mode, ovens can hit 800 levels—however the door locks. So he snipped off the protection latch with a pair of backyard shears. Others have accomplished the identical, voiding the guarantee on their oven within the identify of higher pizza.
Nonetheless, nothing you are able to do in a regular kitchen competes with the instruments {that a} pizzeria has at its disposal. Conventional business pizza ovens are gigantic and costly, generally costing upwards of $20,000. Among the oldest pizzerias in the US nonetheless use their authentic ovens, manufactured almost a century in the past. Even when your oven reaches 750 levels, its partitions “are usually not going to be as thick because the partitions of a business pizza oven,” J. Kenji López-Alt, a chef and the writer of The Meals Lab: Higher House Cooking Via Science, instructed me. “So there’s simply much less warmth power trapped in there.”
Transportable ovens are just like the iPhones of dwelling pizza making: They’ve modified the whole lot. The prototype for the primary Ooni, launched on Kickstarter in 2012, appears to be like extra like a medieval torture system than something you could possibly feasibly use to prepare dinner. It was quickly joined by the Roccbox, a stainless-steel dome that may run on both wooden or fuel. Newer fashions have gotten progressively higher. The ovens aren’t that sophisticated, however they’re genius. They’re pretty cheap, and sufficiently small to tackle tenting journeys and seaside holidays. For the house prepare dinner who isn’t making 100 pizzas in a single go, “it’ll do an excellent job at mimicking a restaurant oven,” López-Alt stated.
For some time, these ovens could possibly be present in comparatively few backyards. Then America went pizza-oven wild in the course of the pandemic. What’s higher than nurturing a sourdough starter? Nurturing a sourdough starter, topping it with sauce, and launching it into the flames. In 2020, Ooni gross sales elevated by 300 p.c. The ovens have stayed in excessive demand, Joe Derochowski, an analyst on the market-research agency Circana, instructed me. At housewares exhibits today, he stated, “you see pizza ovens throughout.” Scott Wiener, a pizza skilled who leads excursions in New York Metropolis, all the time asks his teams in the event that they make pizza at dwelling and the way they prepare dinner it. “One individual will say ‘Ooni,’ each time,” he instructed me.
Maybe a part of the attraction of those dwelling ovens is that they fulfill the identical urge that utilizing a grill does: Let’s face it; hearth is enjoyable. Historically, although, pizza has been considered an extension of baking ; in Italy, pizza originated with bread bakers trying to promote low-cost meals to staff. Lots of the earliest pizzerias within the U.S. have been based by bakers who had arrived from Italy. However making pizza is actually much more like grilling a burger than baking bread. Let your pizza sit for a number of seconds too lengthy, and the flames will take the dough from calmly singed to totally incinerated. (All pizza is best than no pizza—besides when that pizza is so burnt, it tastes like ash.)
House pizza ovens characterize the following technology of grilling; they take these acquainted, irresistible propane flames and apply them to a different area of cooking completely. And as with grilling, to make good pizza, you want accoutrements. I slide my home made pizza into the Ooni utilizing one instrument, spin it round with one other, after which monitor the warmth with one more. Pizza ovens “echo the barbecue world and the home-grilling world,” Wiener stated. For $1,000, you should buy an Ooni that allows you to prepare dinner three pizzas directly and remotely observe the temperature out of your cellphone. As Ragusea put it: “Males love their fucking toys.”
Tools and devices can solely take you to this point. Even with the fanciest oven available on the market, you continue to need to learn to stretch the dough and get it into the oven with out creating an rectangular mess. “There’s all these particular strategies concerned in pizza that don’t apply to every other type of cooking,” López-Alt stated. If you wish to be taught, there are pizza boards, pizza Fb teams, and so, so many pizza YouTube movies.
My first pizza, made in my kitchen oven, was so oversauced that it was extra like tomato soup in a bread bowl. A ridiculous variety of movies later, my pizza recreation has gone from JV to the massive leagues. Pizza ovens beget movies on the way to use them, begetting extra curiosity in ovens, begetting extra movies. It’s a spin wheel of nice pizza.
Even within the Ooni, my pizzas are usually not higher and even that less expensive than what you’d discover in an excellent pizzeria, however they’re mine. I get why my fellow pizza diehards collect on-line not solely to hone their approach, but in addition to share their creations (even once they would possibly give any Italian nonna a coronary heart assault). Candied lemon and ricotta pizza! Mexican avenue corn pizza! Detroit-style Chongqing-chicken pizza topped with inexperienced onion and sesame seeds!
The irony of the pizza revolution is that this must be a second for a pizza recession. Keep in mind when the one factor you could possibly get delivered was pizza, and possibly Chinese language meals? While you least needed to prepare dinner, it was pizza time: In 2011, one of many greatest days for pizza consuming was the day earlier than Thanksgiving. Now you possibly can DoorDash penne alla vodka or a pork banh mi. But People have fallen even deeper in love with pizza.
Now you can discover superb pizza nearly all over the place. Pizza pop-ups are opening utilizing newer, bigger variations of a budget moveable ovens. “5 years in the past, if you happen to needed to open a cell pizza firm, then you would need to spend simply $5,000 on an oven and a trailer,” Wiener stated. “Now you possibly can spend half of that, and get two of those ovens.”
Nonetheless, the pizza sicko doesn’t all the time win. Not too long ago, the pizza cravings bought me late one night. I fired up the Ooni, fiddled with the dough, and was able to launch a pie when my starvation sapped my focus. The dough had a gap in it, and disintegrated into sloppy goo within the oven. A lot for that.
A part of getting a pizza oven is studying the way to use it. The opposite half is studying when you must simply depart it to the professionals.
This text seems within the January 2025 print version with the headline “I’m a Pizza Sicko.” While you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.