The BEST Indoor Pizza Oven on the Internet (Sort Of…)

so a few weeks ago I tested the cheapest pizza oven I could find and while it did turn out some decent Pizza My ultimate conclusion was that I'm better off just using my home oven at least for the styles of pizza that I like to make but since then I found another option that looks like it's going to be quite a bit better and although it's quite a bit more expensive than the other one it's still a lot cheaper than most other options out there and it seems to have quite a few advantages over a home oven at least in theory but we won't know for sure until we give it a track so this one's a biggie as you can see but that's also kind of the reason I wanted it let's take a look so the stone came intact that's a good sign better than the last S I tested I probably made that look way harder than what it needed to be but it's pretty nice I like this door a lot better than the other one I had the other one you kind of had to lift and latch it on this one super easy it's kind of like spring loed again feels pretty good quality now I mentioned that the size was one of the main reasons I bought this and that's because this thing can actually bake 18in pizzas at least that's what they claim eh 17 and 3/4 close enough I guess based on some of the reviews I was a little skeptical about how the quality would be but already it's night and day between this one and the viore one that I tested before it actually feels like a pretty solid product I mean it's not going to be like as high quality as a 2,000$ 3,000 $55,000 oven but for $700 for this size definitely not too bad and the other main advantage of this one is that that it actually claims to get up to 840 de F and not only that but it has controllable both top and bottom heating elements so I can really dial in the balance between the top and the bottom of the pizza actually wait so on further inspection you can't actually individually control the temperatures of the top and bottom heating element I thought this top one here was a separate temperature gauge but it's actually just a timer what you can do is you set the overall temperature of the oven and then you can turn off and on the top heating element as need be which I guess is fine I really would have preferred if you could individually control each temperature but this should work fine I think what I'll do is just keep the top heating element on at all times because in theory that should heat up the stone anyways and you should really only need to use the bottom heating element if you're baking a bunch of pizzas back to back now it also comes with legs which I still have to screw on here and it's also always recommended to run a new oven for at least an hour or so to kind of season it and get any of that factory chemical residue off so I'm going to do that and then we're going to bake some pizza all right not sure if this is a recommended approach but I put this thing in my kitchen for a couple reasons the first is so I could put it under my hood here but the second is because in my kitchen I have 20 amp circuits now I'm not an Electronics expert but this oven takes 1,700 WTS and based on what I understand a typical 15 amp circuit at 120 volts can only handle up to 1,800 WTS which is coming in a little bit close with this oven so with this 20 amp circuit I think I can handle about 2400 WTS which should give me plenty of wiggle room but anyways let's talk about how we're going to bake with this thing so like I mentioned the maximum temperature here is 840 de F and I already did that initial seasoning step the other day and when I did that I had both the top and bottom burners active and I set it to the maximum temperature and it took just about an hour to get all the way up to 10 but it was evident right away that the stone was way too hot just kind of as I suspected so when I'm actually baking this pizza what I'm going to do is only activate the top burner so obviously the stone is still going to get hot because I mean it's still in the oven but without the heat coming from underneath it hopefully it won't get hot quite as quickly ideally I think I want a stone temp around maybe 700 or 750 I'm not 100% sure because I've never baked in an oven that gets this hot but that's just my initial assumption I'm just going to keep an eye on it I'm actually really curious to see how long it takes to heat up with just that one burner all right so about an hour later this oven was still only up to like 575° f so I gave it like another 20 minutes or so and it's still only sitting at about 600 so I don't think this method is going to work I guess I have no choice but to turn on that bottom burn in the meantime though while I was waiting for this oven to heat I got a delivery of this new 18-in pizza peel because before I only had the 16in one however I noticed a pretty big problem with this it doesn't fit because even though this oven claims to be 18 in the opening is more like 17 1/2 which is a big enough difference that you can't use an 18in peel and since no one really makes 17-in peels I'm probably just going to cut this one down myself specifically to use with this oven that's going to take some time though so for today I'm just going to use my 16in one so after about another 20 minutes of heating my oven was up over 700° so I shaped my dough and here I'm using what's probably my favorite dough recipe basically a high hydration version of my New York style pizza so I topped it with my New York style sauce followed by some grated peino and finally some whole milk low moisture mozzarella then I slid the pizza off and in this oven the pizza baked in just about 5 minutes and I rotated it halfway through to ensure even baking all right so definitely doesn't look too bad for the first bake not exactly the result I was looking for though I underestimated sort of how tight that space would be so even trying to make this 17-in pizza is not super easy and the last problem that I noticed before I actually try this pizza is the bottom got pretty burnt so my stone had gotten up to probably like 800° by the time I stretch the dough and move my camera around and all that type of thing so it's definitely too hot but even so let's give it a try and see what we're working with yeah so despite the burtness on the bottom this actually is a really good pizza I mean definitely different than anything I can make in my home oven not to say it's necessarily better than anything I can make in my home oven at least not yet I think we might be able to get there with this oven because I'm actually really happy with the sort of Browning I was able to get on top I think it's got just that little bit of charring without being burnt and it's not too uniform and brown like it's kind of got a little bit of that leopard spotting type effect which personally I do like and now that I'm thinking about it I do have another theory for how I might be able to make a better pizza but first it's time for a quick coffee break thanks to this video sponsor trade so if you've been watching this channel for a while you know that I'm a pretty big coffee Enthusiast and I've been using trade basically since the beginning because the most important step to making great coffee is to use freshly roasted beans ideally roasted no more than 3 or 4 weeks ago which is a stark contrast to your typical grocery store coffee that's been roasted at least a few months ago by the time it hits the shelves by that point it's already stale and the flavor difference is night and day and that's where trade comes in Trade coffee delivers freshly roasted personally curated coffees straight to your door enabling you to make your best cup of coffee at home every single day trades algorithm will pick coffees that best suit your taste out of their over 450 different choices and the beans will always be shipped within 48 Hours of roasting to make sure they're as fresh as possible for me I told Trey that I prefer lighter roast but I also want to be surprised with new and unique flavors and I'm honestly never disappointed my most recent coffee is from blueprint coffee in St Louis it's a naturally processed coffee from Uganda and it's absolutely delicious with strong fruity notes and chocol undertones and what I also love about trade is that it's super flexible and easy to use you can set any delivery frequency you like and it's easy to delay an order if you need to or even to expedite an order if you're running low on coffee sooner than expected and right now you can receive a free bag of coffee with any trade subscription using my link in the description below so thanks a lot to trade for sponsoring this video and thank you for your support now let's make this pizza so this time I tried using only the top burner even though I knew the oven wouldn't get hot enough because I figured that maybe the int density of the top burner set to maximum heat would be enough to sort of broil the pizza but it wasn't even after about a 7 minute bake the top crust was still undercook due to the lower oven temperature and the bottom had almost zero crispness leading to a pretty Flappy pizza so I kept going trying again and again and again and nothing quite seemed to be working so at some point I had to start rethinking My Method so I mean I think that with a little more tweaking I can achieve a passible result but I would basically have to just bake at lower temperatures for longer periods of time which kind of defeats the whole purpose of using this type of oven but as I kept thinking about it I had a pretty big realization which made me think I might be approaching this whole thing wrong so we already know that in a home oven generally steel works better than Stone and that's because steel has a higher thermal conductivity basically meaning that it transfers its heat really well to whatever it comes in contact with in this case the bottom of our pizza but we also know that once you get to highend temperature above about 600° that conductivity is actually a little bit too high and in that case you're actually better off using Stones so that you don't burn the bottom of the pizza but I'm also finding that there comes a temperature where even stone is a little bit too conductive it seems to be when you reach right about 750° F so I'm thinking that there must be material that works even better than this cordite stone at those higher temperatures obviously there must be because neopolitan style pizzas are baked anywhere between 800 and 1,000° and they don't burn and that's because they use a material called biscoto Stone it's not actually a stone it's like a clay material but it has a very low thermal conductivity almost a tenth of your typical curite pizza stone but there are a few problems with it still the first is that like I said neopolitan style pizzas are baked between about 800 and 1,000° whereas with my oven I'm maxing out at probably about 800 by the time you account for heat loss from opening and closing the oven so this might not actually be conductive enough for what I need and normally I would just go ahead and buy one and give it a try but these things are pretty expensive and they're shipped from Italy so by the time you take into account shipping it cost me like $260 for the stone I need so I don't think it would really make sense for me to buy one of these right now because I actually found another option on my trusty pizzamaking.com I found an old thread where people were walking through the different thermal conductivities and there was actually a material introduced that I hadn't heard of before it's called fiber Min and it actually has a conductivity between cordite and those biscoto stones and conveniently it comes in a size that should be perfect for my oven and it's only $87 three business days later my stone is here maybe just a smidge smaller than the one it came with but otherwise pretty much a perfect fit so go ahead and Heat this oven and see what we're working [Music] with all right so of course I got a phone call right after I put this one on the peel so that kind of stuck and the shape turned out a little funky but with that aside when we take a look at the bottom it's easily the best pizza yet I think this s was still close to 800° by the time I put it in the oven so I'm pretty impressed that it didn't burn too badly honestly this is kind of how I like it I know some people would say it's a little bit too well done one thing I am a little confused about though is the top crust obviously there's a lot less Browning here than I got on my previous pizzas despite the lack of Browning though still pretty good crispness on the top wow so that bottom crust is super crisp this is probably about a 75% hydration dough and it's been out of the oven for like 10 or 12 minutes but that crispiness isn't going anywhere a lot of that was probably because this was actually a pretty long bake time since I wasn't seeing that brownie on the top crust I left it in for about 7 minutes so again pretty impressive that the bottom crust didn't burn even for that long of a bake I would like to get that shorter my ideal range is kind of like 4 to 6 minutes because honestly this might even be a little too crisp regardless of all that though I'm not quite convinced that it makes sense to buy one of these if you're only making pizza at home because for me I actually bought it for a different reason because I've mentioned it before on this channel but I'm starting to do some pizza popup events and so I needed an oven that I could bring around with me and get consistent results with if you want to find out about my events you can follow me on Instagram but anyways I think this oven will be pretty decent for my needs the main thing I'm concerned about though is the recovery time when I threw the pizza in it was at about 800° and it dropped all the way to about 600 by the time the pizza was done baking so with this current setup I couldn't really bake pizza after Pizza repeatedly but I do have have a couple ideas for how I'm going to fix that in the meantime though I need to put this up into another test because I mentioned that it might not be necessary for this style of pizza since you can achieve pretty good results in a home oven but the true test of any pizza oven is whether it can make a Neapolitan style [Music] pizza so I've got my neopolitan style pizza here and the reason I was really curious to try this one out is because you may know but neopolitan style pizza typically uses is double zero flour which is not malted unlike most American Flowers which are malted basically meaning it doesn't Brown as quickly and so even if my other dough couldn't handle the highest temperature of this oven this pizza might be able to also it bakes for a shorter period of time this one baked in about 2 minutes and 15 seconds so still longer than the 60 to 90 seconds that you'd want with a traditional Neapolitan style pizza but overall not too bad let's take a look and see what we're working with so definitely a pretty solid Pizza Pizza it is significantly crisper than what you'd want with a neopolitan style pizza I probably could have gone a little bit higher on the hydration with this one I did 62% but I guess given the longer bake time I could have gone up to maybe 65 or 67% but the biggest problem with it is the bottom it's still pretty burnt I was kind of surprised that was the case even with such a short bake but immediately when I put the pizza in the oven I could smell it burning so I think even taking it out sooner really wouldn't have fixed that issue again I can maybe try fiddling with the settings like turning off the bottom burner once the pizza is in the oven but it's not exactly an ideal solution I wish that I did have one of those biscoto stones that might be the piece that would fix this like I said though those things are just super expensive I mean buying one would be like a third of what I spent on the oven itself so I just don't know that it's worth all right I'll give it a try so it came packed really well as you can see it's supposed to be in two pieces I don't know why exactly they do that probably the material just isn't strong enough to support being a bigger piece I guess but based on the dimensions online it should fit this oven perfectly what we do need to do is cure this St before it's ready to use now all of these instructions are in Italian let me let me uh translate this here clean the B biscuit they call it a biscuit but I think it's pretty self-explanatory it's saying 100° C for 90 minutes and then you turn the oven up to 150° C for another 90 minutes and then up to 200° for another 60 minutes and then this probably says let it cool before using so I'm not going to have pizza today but I'm going to do that curing process make some more Dough because the one I made before kind of sucked and I'll be back tomorrow all right so I've got my final pizzas here and as you can see I made two and they look pretty significantly different so we'll get into that in a minute I think this dough turned out a lot better than the last batch though I used a little bit of a higher hydration and a bit more yeast as well so let me start by giving them a try so they're both pretty solid slices but as you can probably tell just by looking at it this one's definitely better the bottoms of them are both really nice but with this one there's almost no Browning on the top whereas this one looks pretty good and interesting thing is this one was actually baked in the pizza oven the thing is though I'm pretty sure my oven died on me right before I threw this in the oven I noticed when I went to throw it in that I wasn't able to turn the light on so I tried resetting the fuse basically trying anything I could think of and I couldn't get it to work again so of course the stone was still hot but I wasn't getting any heat from the top so obviously that's a pretty big issue I'm still going to have to try to figure this out see if it's dead or maybe it just some sort of overheating protection so I'll jump in here with a little update all right future Charlie here so it turns out the oven does in fact still work what I found is that there's a reset button on the back of it and when I try pressing that button at first it didn't work but after I let the oven cool for about an hour and a half I tried the reset button again and it fixed the issue I was having so it does seem to be some sort of overheat protection which I guess is a good thing and once I got the oven back up and running it did turn out a pretty decent Neapolitan style pizza and to be fair I'm probably like 90% sure that the overheating was because I had the oven set over top of my real oven which was also set to its highest temperature and the reason I was doing that was because of the second pizza this one was actually baked in my normal oven and as you can see the result was actually pretty good what I did was set my baking steel to the highest rack and then preheat my oven for about 60 minutes then right before I threw this thing in I cranked the broiler on to high slid the pizza in and it baked in about 3 minutes I just rotated it a couple times throughout the process so I mean considering this it really doesn't make sense to buy anything like that at home I do think that biscoto stone gave it a more authentic neopolitan style feel but it's not a big enough difference to justify the cost and the amount of space that that thing takes up I was hoping use it for my pizza popup events we'll have to see if I can even do that but I think this goes to show that you can pretty much bake any style of pizza at home with just a little bit of Ingenuity and testing speaking of which if you want to see how I make my New York style pizza you can check out that video right here either way thanks a lot for watching and I'll talk to you in the next one

Channel: Charlie Anderson

Views: 168,918

Keywords: How to cook, how to become a better cook, how to become a better home cook, how to cok

Id: gsr_31lrOFk

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023