Home cooks generally buy a portable pizza oven to supplement their outdoor grill for one overriding reason: They want to be able to make a great Neapolitan-style pizza any day of the week. No company has done better at scratching that pizza itch over the last decade than Ooni, which claims to have launched the world's first portable wood-based (pellet) pizza oven via Kickstarter in 2012 — and has pretty much dominated the market ever since. Originally spelled Uuni — the Finnish word for oven — the company based in Scotland has sold millions of pizza ovens in more than 100 countries over the last decade, many of them during the Covid-19 pandemic, when people were suddenly stuck at home and tasked with daily cooking and/or obsessed with dough-making.
And the quality just keeps improving with updated models in multiple price ranges. Food & Wine earlier this month declared Ooni's tabletop Koda 16 Pizza Oven, which runs on gas and retails for around $600 on Amazon, as the best overall pizza oven in 2024. But maybe you don't want to dig that deep into your pocket.
The Ooni Karu 12 pizza oven, which can be fueled with either charcoal or wood and also makes a restaurant-quality pizza in as little as 60 seconds, can be had for as little at $240. While chef Anthony Taglieri has years of experience cooking pizza in commercial wood-fired ovens, last fall was the first time he got his hands on an Ooni — three of them actually. He quickly fell in love with how easy it was to cook i.