The Internet’s Cheapest Indoor Pizza Oven… Is It Any Good?

I bought the cheapest pizza oven I could find online it cost me a whopping 167 dollars which is over 20 times less than even the most affordable professional options even compared to most home options though it's a fraction of the price so let's open it up and see what we're working with all right it's Pizza Oven I can find that actually uses a pizza stone as opposed to just being like a metal Rack or conveyor belt type oven a lot of those cheap ones out there basically just glorified toaster ovens this one is a glorified toaster oven with a pizza stone you may have our first problem already yep so despite how much styrofoam is in here the pizza stone actually did come cracked now I knew that was a possibility based on some reviews that I read but according to some other people they were able to reach out to support and they were able to get a new one so what is this is this paint oh Lord why would they do that so so far not the best user experience I mean I'm glad they try to protect it at least but I feel like there's a better way to do that anyways the other reason that I bought this was because in theory it's big enough to bake nearly a 16 inch pizza and it does it without being too massively big massively big and it does it without being too oversized I mean 22 inches by 18 and a half by ten so I mean it's big but it's not as big as a lot of the other Ovens that I've seen on the market I mean some are even bigger than this and they can only bake like 12 or 14 inch pizzas and for me living in a relatively small apartment the space saving aspect is a huge benefit now there are some other disadvantages related to that which we'll get into in a few minutes but first let's try to figure out this Stone situation so I do have this baking stone which is about 12 by 15. and yeah I mean there's some empty space in there on the sides but it looks like it would work I also have my baking steel Pro which is actually 16 by 16. all right so yeah I mean this thing would work but it is actually on a slight slant even that just half inch difference in size makes it so that it rests on this other lip here where it's supposed to supposed to be able to rest down here it's kind of hard to show on camera but I think this would work the toppings would probably slide a little bit from one side to the other so I probably will try it later in this video but first let's try to get us a new stone all right so it's been less than 24 hours I already got a response from vivore on the pizza stone situation and in the meantime though I found a nice little home for this pizza but let's see what vivore had to say about our pizza stone dear customer thank you for your message we're sorry for any inconvenience cost please provide us with a few photos to confirm the problems all right so about another 12 hours later we got another message from vivore support so let's see what they have to say this time to your customer thank you for your inquiry we are contacting the technician but we have not received a response yet why do they why do you need a technician [Music] let me just use this I'm Gonna Leave This running for a bit and actually I'm gonna move it over under my hood by myself because probably during this first run it's going to be burning off some of that chemical residue from production and based on some reviews online I heard that it could get kind of smoky yeah definitely starting to get Smoky yeah so about 18 minutes and now we're pushing about 6.75 so it's actually gotten hotter than what it said it was going to obviously my thermometer is probably not 100 accurate but I mean that was one of the big advantages that they stated over a home oven is that it heats up so quickly it's definitely a good sign so for this first bake I'm just making my standard New York style pizza recipe so I'll leave that video and recipe linked below but since neither my baking steel or the small pizza stone I currently have fit properly into this oven I came up with another method and it starts by building the pizza on a screen which is basically just a vented aluminum sheet rather than on a pizza peel like what I would usually do all right so I've got my pizza here ready to go now with this oven without the pizza stone there's basically two ways that I can bake because it came with this wrap back which can go in either upside down like this where the surface of the rack would be basically right up against the bottom heating element or it could go right side up where if I were to set the pizza on top it'd be almost right up against the top heating element now I'm not exactly sure which one's going to be better but I think what I'm going to do is start with it upside down and if I notice the bottom of the pizza is starting to burn I can always just take it out and flip this thing over to get the top of the pizza finished cooking before the bottom Burns too much again without a stone I'm not exactly sure how well this is going to work but I figured it was worth a try and by the way this thing did seem to max out at about 660 exactly what it said it was going to so it looks pretty promising [Music] all right well this actually looks pretty solid I ended up baking it for about five and a half minutes and I just kept it at full blast the whole time now personally I would prefer a little bit more Browning on top but that should be something that we can adjust just by moving the pizza a little bit closer to the heating element I haven't looked at the bottom yet so this is my first time using this screen I thought it was pretty well seasoned but turns out always season your screens folks as you can see not a lot of Browning even being that close to the heating element we just didn't get that same Browning and charring that we could get from the steel I thought being that close to the bottom heating element would be enough to Brown that bottom but you know it feels pretty floppy so binding into them they're not as bad as I thought they'd be they do have a little bit of Christmas to them but still nothing near what you would get with a stone or steel I think even if I were to just reheat these on my steel at a super high temp they'd end up being pretty good but of course that would defeat the whole purpose I mean if I were to have to heat my oven I might as well just bake the pizza in the oven in the first place and honestly the results that I get in my oven so far are better than this one but obviously I'm not using it as intended I'm still waiting for my stone to arrive assuming they're able to send me a new one but in the meantime I do have another idea so this time I'm still using my standard New York style pizza recipe but I'm gonna try baking on my baking steel which should help me to get that extra charring and crispiness on the bottom that I'm looking for but I also wanted more Browning on the top so what I'm going to do is place the rack and it's right side up position and then place the steel on top of that that'll get the pizza super close to the top heating element which in theory should get us the most Browning possible all right so I got the oven fully up to Temp here it took about 45 minutes with the seal in there which is significantly longer than it did before if you remember about 15 or 20 minutes without the steel which makes sense I mean this steel absorbs a lot of heat that's why it works so well for baking pizza so just naturally it's going to take longer to heat up but the other interesting thing is that once the oven got up to temperature I also took the temperature of my steel and it had already gotten fully up to Temp as well and my home oven it takes about 90 minutes for the steel to fully get up to Temp and even then it's only getting up to like 550 or 575 whereas this one got all the way up to like 650. now of course at those temperatures in theory Stone would be better than steel but I'm only working with this steel because I haven't been able to get that new stone yet so given that if I do notice the bottom of the pizza is starting to burn I can always just slide my screen underneath it after a few minutes to protect it a little bit another potential problem with this setup though is as you can see it's a pretty tight tolerance here between the steel and the top of the oven so as I'm sliding off the pizza it's going to be pretty tough to you know avoid touching the top heating element with the actual pizza so I have to be really careful so let me make my pizza and we'll see how it does [Music] all right huh huh pretty impressed actually with the level of Browning that I was able to get on this top crust here that was kind of my main concern with this oven but getting it closer to that top heating element really seemed to do the trick now there were a few things here that I would definitely do differently first one is I would spin the pizza around a little bit sooner you can see that one side is a little bit more Brown than the other and so I actually left it in the oven a little bit longer than I normally would so that led to a little bit more grease separation which for me personally I don't really like I know some people do but again personally I prefer a little bit of a shorter bake so that actually is really good probably better than anything I could have made in my home oven already I would prefer a little bit more crispness but flavor-wise that Browning on the top really makes a difference the one thing though as I suspected is that the steel is really not ideal for those temperatures immediately when I put it in the oven I could smell burning and you can see just those really dark charred bits which actually have a little bit of bitterness to them just because they are so burnt so I slid the screen underneath after probably less than a minute but because of that the crust didn't really have enough time to crisp up it just kind of charred in some places now I really wish that I could try this thing with the stone and I guess this might be a good time to share the unfortunate news that I did hear back from vivore support and it's not sounding like I'm gonna be able to get a new stone basically they said they couldn't get in contact with the technician whatever that means and they offered me a 20 gift card I told them no I can't really use the pizza oven without the stone I mean that's the whole point of it so then they said okay well what about sixty dollars back thank you now we're cooking the gas well we're still cooking with electric but now we'll be using a pizza stone problem is though I couldn't find a pizza stone that exactly matched the one that came with the oven which is 15 and a half by 15 and a half inches on Amazon all the stones were smaller than that I only saw the ones that I saw so I could have ordered a bigger Stone from a specialty site and then just cut it down to what I needed in fact I do have an 18 inch by 18 inch stone that I use on grills and things like that so I could buy another one and cut it down but I think this ended up costing me like 80 or 100 so it really wouldn't have been worth it so what I did instead was settle for a round pizza stone it's 16 and a half by 16 and a half which is actually exactly the size of the opening of this oven so as long as it fits it should be absolutely perfect it'll allow us to make the biggest possible Pizza ah oh no we're gonna need to do a bit of modification here [Music] well that was easy enough let's give it a try all right so I guess this oven is a little bit deeper than it is wide because I didn't end up sanding off the top or bottom only the left and right sides I mean it's a circle but you know what I mean now we're actually ready to make a pizza but first we need to talk about today's sponsor native Native aims to make Personal Care clean and fun with products that are great for you their deodorants are aluminum and paraben free cruelty free vegan and they're made with ingredients that you've actually 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what I did here too the only difference between this pizza and the last one is that I'm baking on Stone rather than steel all right this looks like a very solid New York style pizza definitely the best one we've made yet with this oven now the biggest problem I had with it was just because the gap between the stone and the top heating element was so tight it was a little hard to slide the pizza out onto the oven you can see the back side of the pizza kind of got pushed up toward the back of the oven and so it flattened it out a little bit I had stretched the pizza to about 14 inches and it ended up at about 13 so I guess not too bad and that's also something that'll get easier with more practice otherwise though this pizza looks super solid it's got a really nice Browning on the top but just a little bit of charring to me that's pretty much perfect for a New York style pizza uh I mean I think this is easily the best New York slice I've made at home pretty amazing how big of a difference that Browning on the top crust actually makes and that's something that I really just struggled to achieve in my home oven I've tried playing around with the broiler a little bit and it works to a certain extent but it's pretty inconsistent I think it's just hard to replicate that same effect of a high heat oven without actually using a high heat oven now even though I was able to get a little bit of a refund I really do wish that I had the original Stone still I could see myself using this for baking bread or just heating up food in general given that it does heat up a lot quicker than my oven and probably uses less energy since it's smaller if I had both of these Stones too I could use the top one for baking the actual pizzas and then use the bottom one for reheating slices seems like it'd be a really good combination even if you buy the round Stone plus the oven you're looking at about 200 total so that's definitely very solid for this type of setup but that still had me wondering how would this oven do with other styles of pizza so what I did was make a recipe which I consider to be a more sort of artisan version of a New York style pizza it's recipe I'm still working on but so far I've achieved pretty good results with it in my home oven the recipe is really meant to be baked at higher temperatures which I simulate in my home oven using my baking steel along with the broiler toward the end of the baking process but I was very curious to see if the slightly higher temperatures of this pizza oven would be enough to get us to a solid result all right so this one I made here like I said is kind of what I consider a more Artisan New York style pizza a little bit of a higher hydration nicer flower stuff like that and it's basically my go-to pizza if I could just pick one style that I want to make it would be this one so I had a little bit of trouble again with the launch this time it was more due to that circular pizza stone one of the edges of the pizza was hanging off the stone just slightly and that's something that wouldn't have happened if I were using a square Stone but overall it turned out pretty good so this oven still doesn't seem to get quite hot enough to handle higher hydration doughs very well again it does really well with lower hydration sort of more classic New York style pizzas but it definitely has its limitations when it comes to other styles [Music] so definitely a very solid Pizza like I said though I can get a better result in my home oven the problem with this one is even though it can get hotter it doesn't have the capability to broil so if you really want to get that charring on the top which personally is one of my favorite things in a pizza you really just can't do it but I do have one more idea that I think might make this pizza a little bit better all right so what I did was just reheated a couple of slices which is part of my usual process for my classic New York slice but for this more sort of Artisan Style typically I don't reheat them got a little bit more charring on the top a little bit more Browning on the cheese a little bit more charring on the bottom seems to have some nice Christmas so I reheated these still at the max temperature for about a minute and 15 seconds and they're still not quite as crispy as they would be in my home oven but they're definitely pretty solid but of course the big question is do I actually think it's worth buying one of these ovens and honestly it kind of just depends I mean obviously this thing takes up a good amount of space so number one you have to add the broom for it but number two it kind of depends on what styles of pizza you like to make I think if you like to make sort of standard New York style pizzas maybe Detroit style or a lot of other styles that don't really require super high temperatures then this thing does that really well I mean like I said the New York style pizza I made was better than anything I've ever made in my home oven however if you want to make a Neapolitan style pizza obviously that's not really going to work in here you just can't get enough charring and it's not going to bake quickly enough and sort of same thing with this more artist in New York style I mean you can come in with a pretty decent result but it's still not going to be as good as something in say a gas powered oven or even in your home oven where you can use the broiler I definitely want to do some more playing around with this oven though I think if I modify the recipe a little little bit maybe add some more sugar to the dough and even play around the baking process a little bit more I think I can get this even better however as it stands right now if I do want to get the absolute best result at least for this style of pizza that I really like to make I'm probably going to stick with my home oven but let me know in the comments if you have any specific recipes or things you want me to try out with this oven and I can definitely make another video in the future in the meantime if you haven't seen my New York style pizza recipe that I made earlier in this video you can check that out right here thanks a lot for watching and I'll talk to you in the next one

Channel: Charlie Anderson

Views: 312,336

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

Id: 0IpBXJ1qqTc

Length: 16min 27sec (987 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 13 2023