ooniKaru 12 Pizza Oven – Portable Wood Fired Pizza Oven, Outdoor Wood and Gas Fired Pizza Oven for Stonebaked Pizza in 60 seconds

**edit 2: I emailed the company. Someone got back to me within 24 hours. Asked for more detail model information and my replacement stone is already on its way to me. Really impressive customer service** edit 6/15/23*. After 3 months of weekly use (i really do love the oven) I discovered today that my pizza stone has cracked. I reached out to Ooni, we will see see how they respond. I’ve had multiple pizza stoneds over the years and another cheaper pizza oven. None of those stones ever cracked. I’ll update the review with the company’s response.**So it’s been an evolution. Starting making pizza on a stone in my oven, to pizza on the big green egg, to pizza in a pellet pizza oven (the ok mimiuo outdoor pizza oven) to this. In fairness I’ve only used it once (a test run last night where I got it to temp and baked some pitas) but I’ve been at this game long enough that I can tell how good this is. I should note that I was mostly fine with the mimiuo. It was inexpensive and workable. The airflow was not great and I struggled to get the stone sufficiently hot relative to the top of the oven (in part because of how crude the airflow controls were) but I was able to make some passable pizzas. I never got the snap in the crust I wanted but it was ok. I always hated the pellets. they simply don’t taste or smell like actual wood. I found myself trying to run the pellet oven with actual wood. Which sort of worked ish. Long story. I wanted to upgrade and the firebox on the mimiuo died so. Here we are. 1) the fit and finish on the Ooni are amazing. There are no unfinished surfaces. No raw edges. 2) it is very well insulated. The box still feels hot outside. But not nearly like the last one, the oven door and fire box door are heavily insulted (and actually heavy). They also close with a near air tight fit. This is essential as it ensures all the airflow is moving through the desired paths. Not leaking in where it shouldn’t. The result is an oven that is hot enough to cook in 15 minutes (and mind you it’s late winter here so quite cold out). The prior oven took close to an hour and the stone was never hot enough. I’m my experiment. I got the stone to about 700F and the oven temp to around 840F. 8” pita bread were cooking in 15 seconds. With a turn required at 10s I’ll do a pizza tomorrow and update my review but so far couldn’t be more impressed.

Quality is very high, design is sleek and overall a very impressive unit. I have a high end Weber grill that I have been using with a pizza stone and the quality upgrade of the wood fired pizza has been significant. Happy with the gear up time for the stone to reach temp, takes a little longer than on the grill but faster than the oven, about 25 minutes with using wood.Sharing some of my experience below on how to start out:Huge energy saver going with the wood fuel option. Very efficient unit, can't speak to how much propane it goes through when using that option because we only want wood fired pizza, but it really requires very little wood. I do use some charcoal to get it going, about 12 briquettes.Purchased a nice long metal grill brush with a scraper to clean the stone between pizza's. This thing runs hot with an open flame and the leftover flour on the stone after cooking a pizza, gets turned to bitter ash that will stick to the bottom of your next pie and impact the flavor significantly.High temp glove or tongs are good to have on hand to adjust the baffle when cooking. I fully open the baffle to get up to cooking temp. For my dough recipe, the sweet spot is around 700 surface temp on the stone to start cooking. The top was cooking too quickly for me with the baffle fully opened, so I found closing it half way while cooking made a very even cook from top to bottom. May take some trial and error to get it right for your dough.Found the tinder box full of wood gets through two pizza's before needing to add wood and gave about 2 full minutes for the new wood to catch before going back in to cook.Making my own dough, big difference. I tested out the store bought and it seems more geared to an oven baked pizza and darkened too much before cooking through. I'm sure you could play with it by cooking at a lower temp but really, the quickly cooked pizza is what gives that perfect dough consistency that I was missing on the Weber.