You have a perfectly arranged garden and an even more beautiful patio, so what could you be missing? You have beautiful lighting, a comfortable outdoor furniture set, a BBQ and dining area, so everything looks and feels perfect. But what if you had more options for cooking than just making BBQ for your family and friends? If there is enough room in your outdoor area, a pizza oven would be an amazing addition to your outside entertaining space.
Although commonly used as pizza ovens, these units can be used for more than just making pizza – you can make roasted veggies, bread meets and anything that you cook in your regular oven. Outdoor ovens come in a range of styles, but to make the most out of your money, you need to decide which one will meet your needs better – whether a wood-burning oven or a gas one?
Wood fired pizza oven
A wood burning oven is a little more complex, so make sure you choose wisely if you don’t want to end up waiting for three hours for the oven to heat adequately. Although wood pizza oven takes time to build, light and come to the right temperature, the food flavour, warmth, aroma, and ambiance it creates are worth every minute. However, a wood burning oven has a capacity to attain higher temperature which cuts the pizza cooking time in half. As a result, you can expect your pizza to be ready in about five minutes. Once you try pizza baked in a wood-fired oven, you will never want to go back to eating pizza baked in any other way. Wood fired ovens boost food flavour making it more unique and smoky and that can not be achieved with a traditional home oven.
If you decide to buy a wood-fired pizza oven, make sure to do proper research first as not all of them were created equal. If you don’t pay attention to the details, you could end up with a pizza oven that takes up to three hours to adequately heat and you’ll spend more hours topping it up with wood. There are even some models in which the smoke escapes out the front and not up to a flue, which means you can’t really sit too close to them. For this very reason, when buying, look for a flue and lots of insulation to ensure the oven won’t take too much time to heat up and will be easy to maintain.
Gas pizza oven
What is great about this pizza oven is that it does not require too much time to prepare it for baking or to reach the adequate temperature. Just flick the switch, set the thermostat and the oven will instantly produce constant and consistent heat at the temperature you desire. If you still want the visual effect of a wood-fired oven but you are more about the convenience of gas, then you can consider a gas/wood oven. Some wood burning ovens come with a gas burner under the floor that creates additional heat and reduces the cooking time.
