Does a pizza oven keep you warm?

If you’re a pizza lover or passionate about cooking, you’re going to love wood-burning pizza ovens. They’re not only made to cook the most delicious pizzas, but they also work as fireplaces to spend a relaxing time with your family.

When you’re sitting in a cosy spot and inhaling the delicious aroma of roasting meat, your senses light up and your whole body gets warm. Wood pizza ovens are an essential part of alfresco dining. In addition to cooking up a tasty dish, they also warm up the surrounding areas.

Aside from using it on the grill, you can use it in the oven for bread baking and on the stovetop as well, where it functions as a griddle. But for pizza specifically, steel is a great choice because of how quickly it conducts heat; you’ll get golden brown crusts with spots of char just like at your local pizzeria.

Tom Gozney, founder of Gozney (opens in new tab) pizza ovens says: ‘With a smaller pizza oven you can easily pop a small skillet pan in and then cook everything from burgers, steaks, prawns and eggs or you can bake things like flatbreads and calzones directly on the stone floor.

The easiest way to prevent burnt pizza on the grill is to bake one side of the pizza first. Then pull it off the grill, turn it (so the baked side is facing up), and top the pizza. The hot crust will help the cheese melt and the toppings to start cooking. Then place it back on the grill with the lid on.

The key to using a pizza stone on a charcoal grill is to keep most of the charcoal positioned under this area that is adjacent to the pizza stone. If you load up the charcoal directly under the stone, the stone will be about 800-900 degrees and the dome temperature will register about 350.

Just stack a few bricks on the grill and put a pizza stone on top. This allows the heat to circulate around and underneath the pizza, ensuring that the crust and toppings finish cooking at the same time. “It’s like a convection grill,” Sunny Anderson points out.

You can also pop a pizza stone on the barbecue (gas or coal) to get that smoky, charred flavour. You may need other pizza accessories, too, including a dough scraper for homemade pizza dough and an efficient pizza cutter.

Will I notice a difference in flavor between wood and gas? You may notice a small difference in flavor. The smell of burning wood will give your pizza a subtle wood-smoked flavor which you won’t get using a gas oven. The difference however will be very slight since your pizza won’t be in the oven for a long time.

Can You Use a Pizza Oven as a BBQ? One of the biggest benefits of a pizza oven is that you can also use it as a barbecue grill and a smoker. However, if all you want to do is grill some burgers, you probably wouldn’t want to have to wait for a big pizza oven to heat up!

If you use a grill to make pizza, you can keep the heat outside where it belongs. Grills also better mimic a wood fired oven than your conventional indoor oven. Whether using charcoal or gas, the smoke from the grill will help give your pizza great flavor that you simply cannot get from a regular oven. It’s also easy!

Prefab and modular models generally fall in the $2,000 to $10,000 range, depending on their size and materials. Portable models can cost as low as $300 to $500, offering a budget option for those looking to invest more in cheese and toppings than brick and mortar.

On a Weber style charcoal grill, the pizza oven insert fits between grill bottom and lid. Use charcoal briquets along with some hardwood and you can achieve temperature in excess of 750 degrees F. The hardwood helps to elevate the temperature and provides a nice wood-fired flavor to your pizza.

If you are cooking pizzas in your outdoor oven, you need the oven to be around 450F. This is the ideal cooking time for the perfect pizza and once heated, your oven should be able to cook pizzas in less than a minute.

We love outdoor living elements that do double duty, but unfortunately, we don’t recommend combining an outdoor fireplace with a pizza oven.