How to choose the best pizza oven for your garden

A good quality pizza oven makes it easy to create authentic, restaurant-quality pizzas for your family and friends. With so many models available, choosing the right one can seem overwhelming. The key is to think about how you’ll use it, what fuel suits your lifestyle and which features will give you the best cooking experience.

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Gas or wood-fired?

One of the biggest decisions when purchasing a pizza oven is your fuel source.

Gas pizza ovens are the easiest to use. They heat up quickly and give you excellent temperature control. Simply turn the burner on, allow the oven to reach temperature and you’re ready to cook. They’re perfect for busy families.

Wood-fired pizza ovens deliver the traditional experience. Burning wood creates the distinctive smoky flavour many people associate with authentic Neapolitan pizza. They do take longer to heat up and require more skill to maintain a consistent cooking temperature, but for the pizza purist, you can’t beat a wood-fired oven.

Hybrid pizza ovens offer the best of both worlds. You can enjoy the speed and convenience of gas for everyday cooking, then switch to wood when you want the flavour of a real wood-fired pizza. The ability to choose which fuel to use is particularly useful if you run out of one type of fuel.

What size pizza oven do you need?

This is not about the size of the pizza, but how many people you normally cook for and how much space you have in your garden.

The smallest ovens cook one pizza at a time, and will reach the high temperatures required to cook pizza faster than larger models. Perfect for couples or small families, these pizza ovens don’t take up a lot of space and are perfect if you want a pizza oven to sit on a worktop outdoors.

The biggest ovens can handle up to five pizzas. These are the ones to look at if you regularly entertain or want to cook more than just pizza. This sort of oven will cook a whole roast meal effortlessly.

Table top or support base?

Pizza ovens can either sit on a work top or on a support base. Which option you choose will depend on your cooking set-up. A large oven can take up a lot of work space, so might be better on a support base, where it can be rolled to wherever it is needed – in the garden, on the terrace or patio. Smaller ovens can fit quite nicely on a work top. The small one-pizza options are often light enough that they can be moved around too.  

Features to look for

It’s worth remembering that the best pizza ovens aren’t simply the hottest, they’re the ones that maintain consistent heat, which is key in pizza cooking.

Look for ovens with double skin insulation. This helps them heat quickly and most importantly, retain heat for longer. A thick cooking floor is important too. Ones made from quality stone or brick typically retain heat better than those made from ceramic.

With a gas oven, many cheaper models place their burners in the back of the oven. This means the heat is blown out the door which is, obviously, very inefficient. Look for a model with a burner at the side, which will circulate heat up and around the combustion chamber.

Fast heat-up times and cooking times are another major advantage. Premium ovens can often reach cooking temperature in around 20 minutes, and can cook pizzas in just 90 seconds, allowing you to quickly serve all your guests.

Finally, think about colour. Alfa Forni pizza ovens are available in a range of colours, including stainless steel, grey, red and yellow. So you can choose something that is understated or go for one that makes much more of a statement. It is worth thinking about how you will use your pizza oven and how it works with the rest of your garden year round.

Accessories

A few well-chosen accessories will make using your pizza oven much easier.

A pizza peel is essential for launching and turning pizzas safely. Look for a peel with multiple perforations that reduce weight and allow excess flour to fall away. This prevents pizzas from baking on burnt flour, which can cause bitter flavours and compromise all your preparation work.

A turning peel is the essential piece of kit for rotating, moving and managing the pizza during baking, allowing you to rotate pizzas during cooking without removing them from the oven.

Get a good pizza oven brush too, one with brass bristles will remove ash, flour and cooking residues with ease. And if you want a cooking tip from us, always use semolina as the base to your doughs… it really helps the pizza not stick to your preparation board or the pizza peel!

Beyond pizza…

While pizza may be the main attraction, a quality pizza oven is far more versatile. Once you’ve mastered pizza, you can bake artisan bread, roast vegetables, cook steaks, prepare fish, slow-roast joints of meat and even bake desserts.

Investing in a high-quality model from the start means your pizza oven is likely to become one of the most-used features in your garden.