The 4 Best Indoor Pizza Ovens, Tested by Food & Wine

Let’s face it: making pizza at home is fun. Even an imperfect pie is good because you created it, and there’s no “right” style of pizza, so you can play with different types of dough to find the one you like to make. You just need a good pizza recipe as a reference point to start. You also don’t need to jump in with an expensive oven since you can make many lower-temperature styles (versus the high heat required for Neapolitan) in your oven with a good pizza stone. After getting started with a stone, you might graduate to a dedicated, specialized outdoor pizza oven for higher, more reliable temperatures and perhaps a few tools to make the process more enjoyable.

Most people think of the wood-burning oven as the pinnacle of pizza accessories. They make good pizza, no doubt — I spent a year working one in a restaurant and have one in my backyard. But they come with the overhead of building and maintaining a fire and are subject to the whims of weather, which sometimes means you aren’t eating pizza that night. 

Minus the wood flavor, indoor, electric pizza ovens can do almost anything a wood-burning oven can and, short of a power outage, won’t let you down when the weather turns. To help find the best indoor pizza oven for your needs, we tested 12 top-selling models. Our guide goes over our four favorites, with guidance from Joshua Hernandez, chef and owner of Ladybug Pizza on Orcas Island, Washington. Keep reading to learn how heat, flour, and pizza styles dictate what you need from an oven for the best pie.

Our Favorite 

Top Picks each earned a perfect score, so picking a favorite from that group was challenging. The Ooni Volt 12 edged out the Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo simply for its slightly lower price, but you won’t go wrong with either model when dealing with high-heat pizza styles.

The Tests

In our testing lab, we try to recreate the consumer experience by performing the steps a home user would take after purchasing. Our four tests included setup, baking two pizza types, and (the dreaded) cleanup.

Setup: We moved the pizza ovens from a storage compartment to the tabletops, where we tested them to see how easily a home user could lift and position them. After reading the instructions, we timed how long it took to heat the oven to cooking temperature, recording the deck’s (stone or other cooking surface) and exterior temperatures via an infrared thermometer.

Control: We baked a cheese pizza using store-bought dough and ingredients on a pizza stone in a conventional oven to compare to the pies we baked in pizza ovens.

Cheese Pizza: Using the same ingredients as the control pizza, we made a cheese pie and started a stopwatch when we launched the pizza onto the deck. When done, we pulled the pizza from the oven and recorded the bake time. When we removed the pie, we immediately checked the deck’s temperature with an infrared thermometer, then rechecked the deck temperature to rate the oven’s recovery time. We let the finished pizza cool for three minutes, then visually compared it to the control pizza.

Pizza with Toppings: We repeated the cheese pizza test, adding green peppers and pepperoni to the pie. Again, we recorded the cooking time, visual comparison after three minutes, and the deck temperature after baking and five minutes later to view the recovery time. We also collected overall impressions of the ease of use, degrees of doneness of the pizza, and overall design of each oven.

Cleaning: With all cooking tasks, there is always cleanup when the fun is over. We followed the manufacturer’s instructions for cleaning and rated the overall experience.

Scoring: To arrive at a final score for each oven, we rated it on a scale of one to five in the following categories: Design, Ease of Use, Performance, and Ease of Cleaning. Performance carried the most weight, where we judged the pizza’s overall quality and the oven’s temperature recovery time.

Factors to Consider

Size

Don’t base the oven’s size capacity (how big of a pizza it will hold) on your ability to handle a dough ball, according to Hernandez. The larger the pizza, the more difficult it is to handle. After some trial and error, most home cooks get pretty adept with a 12-inch pie, but the difficulty level of making a larger pie increases exponentially.

“I mean, it’s fun to make 20-inch pizza, but your average home cook is not going to be able to stretch that out evenly or launch it off of a peel into an oven [without horrible results],” he says. So, balance your ability with your aspirations and reasonable possibilities of growth. We’re politely saying you don’t buy a Ferrari to only drive it to deliver pizza.

Heating Elements

There are two types of heat to consider in a pizza oven. Ambient heat is the temperature inside the oven that largely cooks the toppings, while the deck stores and conducts heat to the crust. Ideally, the deck stores a “pool” of heat, similar to how a cast iron pan heats and distributes evenly. 

You want a deck that gets hot so your dough starts to set immediately on contact and stores enough heat that it doesn’t cool significantly from that contact. While that heat transfers from the deck to the dough, ideally, a bottom element replenishes those heat stores. The best-performing ovens we tested had a top and bottom element, with the top element not only maintaining ambient heat but also restoring heat to the deck.

Temperature Range

High heat isn’t the do-all and end-all, according to Hernandez. “This is one of my favorite things to talk about,” he says. He explains that people have a misconception that high heat is the key to good pizza when it’s actually only desirable for Neapolitan-style pies, for which you want “leoparding” (or dark spotting) on the crust. Neapolitan dough is extremely lean (containing little or no fat or oil) and cooks quickly at high temperatures.

There are a lot of pizza styles in the world, and you should find an oven that accommodates the style(s) you want to make, according to Hernandez, who bakes his New York-style pies at 550°F. They are a different style of dough with a 3% fat content, and the high heat needed for Neapolitan would scorch the pie before it could cook. If you like to alternate between New York and Neapolitan, find an oven that covers those temperature ranges. If you tend towards one or the other (or any other style), find an oven that performs best at the temperature for your preferred dough type.

Care and Cleaning

One of the great things about pizza ovens is that they operate in a temperature range that makes them almost self-cleaning. Any spills on the deck are easy to clean if you scrape out the worst of them with the scraper end of a grill brush before they set, then let the remnants burn off before brushing them with the steel bristle side of the brush. Spills on the door lip are equally easy to clean. Wipe them with a damp cloth held in tongs or while wearing a grill glove. The moisture from the fabric will turn to steam, quickly removing the spill from the oven.

Other Indoor Pizza Ovens We Tested

Strong Contenders

Hamilton Beach 12-Inch Pizza Maker ($78 at Home Depot)

This entry-level pizza oven was very easy to use. It spun the pizzas as it cooked, which helped avoid hot spots during the 14 and 17-minute cooks. There was limited temperature control from a numbered dial and an aluminum pan rather than a stone for baking. We’d suggest it for dorm room or small kitchen space use, as the end product was very good, just not quick-cooking. 

Granitestone PIEZANO Pizza Oven ($127 at Amazon)

The PIEZANO is a waffle maker-like pizza oven that heated quickly and made respectable pies in a little over four minutes. However, it lacks detailed control, and its temperature setting is marked in 200-degree increments, affecting its versatility.

Chefman Home Slice Electric Indoor Pizza Oven ($285 at Amazon)

The Home Slice has top and bottom elements that aid in quick heating and recovery. It ran a little too hot, giving some OK results that would have been great had it not cooked the exterior too quickly.

Betty Crocker Countertop Pizza Maker ($50 at Amazon)

This offering from Betty Crocker is a low-temperature oven that produced better than average pizzas in 12 and 15 minutes. There are no temperature controls, so you won’t be making high-temperature pizzas in it. Instead, the company markets this pizza maker as a multi-functional cooker for quesadillas and omelets, as well.

What Didn’t Make the List

In a rarity for a pool of test subjects, none of the electric pizza ovens we tested scored poorly. The ones that didn’t make the list had slight shortcomings, which may not be real dealbreakers to you. The Presto Pizzazz Plus Rotating Pizza Oven ($50 at Amazon) lacked any real temperature control other than selecting the top, bottom, or both heating elements. It gave a nicely done crust in about 18 minutes, but the toppings were underdone. The Commercial Chef 12-Inch Countertop Pizza Maker is a low-temperature (comparatively) oven that likewise lacked detailed temperature control and was difficult to clean, as many parts weren’t removable. For the Courant 12-Inch Pizza Maker ($50 at Amazon), temperature control looks like an off/on button, and it produced inconsistent results with both pies we made. Finally, the Gemelli Home Pizza Oven ($370 at Amazon), which has five presets for various styles, had some temperature inconsistencies that left our Neapolitan-style pizzas a little soggy in the crust.

Our Expertise

• Greg Baker is an award-winning chef, restaurateur, and food writer with four decades of experience in the food industry, including a reluctant stint as a pizza maker. His written work appears in Food & Wine, Tasting Table, Serious Eats, and other publications.
• For this piece, he consulted Joshua Hernandez, chef and owner of Ladybug Pizza on Orcas Island, Washington.