It’s the Best Time in History to Be a Pizza Sicko
8 min read
In pizza heaven, it is always 950 degrees. The temperature required to make an authentic Neapolitan pizza is stupidly, unbelievably hot—more blast furnace than broiler. My backyard pizza oven can get all the way there in just 15 minutes. Crank it to the max, and the Ooni Koda will gurgle up blue flames that bounce off the top of the dome. In 60 seconds, raw dough inflates into pillowy crust, cheese dissolves into the sauce, and a few simple ingredients become a full-fledged pizza.
Violinists have the Stradivarius. Sneakerheads have the Air Jordan 1. Pizza degenerates like me have the Ooni. I got my first one three years ago and have since been on a singular, pointless quest to make the best pie possible. Unfortunately, I am now someone who knows that dough should pass the windowpane test. Do not get me started on the pros and cons of Caputo 00 flour.
An at-home pizza oven is a patently absurd thing to buy. Much to my wife’s consternation, I now own two. It’s all the more ridiculous considering that I live in New York City, where amazing pizzerias are about as easy to spot as rats, and space is a precious commodity; this is not a town that favors single-use kitchen tools. These devices do one thing well (pizza) and only that one thing (pizza). My 12-inch Ooni is among the cheapest and smallest high-heat pizza ovens out there, and it still clocks in at $400 and 20 pounds. You can get an 11-in-1 combination Instant Pot and air fryer for a fraction of the cost.
But somehow, the portable-pizza-oven market is booming. Ooni makes nine different models—including a $900 indoor version that’s like a souped-up toaster oven—and similar products are available from companies including Cuisinart, Ninja, Gozney, and Breville. Oprah included a pizza oven in her 2023 gift guide. Florence Pugh has Instagrammed her portable-oven odysseys.
The paradox of pizza has long been this: America’s favorite food—one that an eighth of the country eats on any given day—is difficult, if not impossible, to make well at home. Not anymore. We are in the middle of a pizza revolution; there has simply never been a better time to make pizza at home.
The traditional home oven is great for lots of things: chocolate-chip cookies, Thanksgiving turkeys, roasted brussels sprouts, whatever. Pizza is not one of them. Let’s consider a classic New York pie, which doesn’t require the same extreme heat as its Neapolitan brethren. It sounds weird, but you want the pie to be medium rare. The crust should be crispy but still pliable, the cheese melted but not burned. The only way to achieve that is to blast pizza dough with heat from both top and bottom—about 600 degrees at the very least, preferably 650. But nearly every kitchen range tops out at 550 degrees. “By whatever accident of fate, the level of heat that’s necessary is just out of the reach of a typical home oven,” Adam Ragusea, a food YouTuber who is helping open up a pizzeria in suburban Knoxville, Tennessee, told me. That temperature discrepancy matters a lot. Try making pizza on a simple aluminum sheet tray in your home oven, and by the time the crust is golden brown, it’ll be brittle like a cracker and the cheese will have puddled into grease.
Overcoming the limitations of the reviled kitchen range has long stumped homemade pizza enthusiasts. Julia Child laid out tiles in her oven to soak up the oven’s heat and transfer it to the crust for extra crispiness. That inspired the pizza stone, an oversize ceramic tile that you insert into your oven. At times, the human will to make a decent pizza at home borders on farce. Before making pizza, some recipes suggest that you should leave your oven at full heat for 45 minutes, or an hour, or even two. In the 2000s, one software engineer in Atlanta realized that in self-cleaning mode, ovens can hit 800 degrees—but the door locks. So he snipped off the safety latch with a pair of garden shears. Others have done the same, voiding the warranty on their oven in the name of better pizza.
Still, nothing you can do in a standard kitchen competes with the tools that a pizzeria has at its disposal. Traditional commercial pizza ovens are gigantic and expensive, sometimes costing upwards of $20,000. Some of the oldest pizzerias in the United States still use their original ovens, manufactured nearly a century ago. Even if your oven reaches 750 degrees, its walls “are not going to be as thick as the walls of a commercial pizza oven,” J. Kenji López-Alt, a chef and the author of The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science, told me. “So there’s just less heat energy trapped in there.”
Portable ovens are like the iPhones of home pizza making: They have changed everything. The prototype for the first Ooni, launched on Kickstarter in 2012, looks more like a medieval torture device than anything you could feasibly use to cook. It was soon joined by the Roccbox, a stainless-steel dome that can run on either wood or gas. Newer models have gotten progressively better. The ovens aren’t that complicated, but they are genius. They are fairly inexpensive, and small enough to take on camping trips and beach vacations. For the home cook who isn’t making a hundred pizzas in one go, “it’ll do a great job at mimicking a restaurant oven,” López-Alt said.
For a while, these ovens could be found in relatively few backyards. Then America went pizza-oven wild during the pandemic. What’s better than nurturing a sourdough starter? Nurturing a sourdough starter, topping it with sauce, and launching it into the flames. In 2020, Ooni sales increased by 300 percent. The ovens have stayed in high demand, Joe Derochowski, an analyst at the market-research firm Circana, told me. At housewares shows these days, he said, “you see pizza ovens all over.” Scott Wiener, a pizza expert who leads tours in New York City, always asks his groups if they make pizza at home and how they cook it. “One person will say ‘Ooni,’ every time,” he told me.
Perhaps part of the appeal of these home ovens is that they satisfy the same urge that using a grill does: Let’s face it; fire is fun. Traditionally, though, pizza has been thought of as an extension of baking ; in Italy, pizza originated with bread bakers looking to sell cheap food to workers. Many of the earliest pizzerias in the U.S. were founded by bakers who had arrived from Italy. But making pizza is really a lot more like grilling a burger than baking bread. Let your pizza sit for a few seconds too long, and the flames will take the dough from lightly singed to fully incinerated. (All pizza is better than no pizza—except when that pizza is so burnt, it tastes like ash.)
Home pizza ovens represent the next generation of grilling; they take those familiar, irresistible propane flames and apply them to another arena of cooking entirely. And as with grilling, to make good pizza, you need accoutrements. I slide my homemade pizza into the Ooni using one tool, spin it around with another, and then monitor the heat with yet another. Pizza ovens “echo the barbecue world and the home-grilling world,” Wiener said. For $1,000, you can buy an Ooni that lets you cook three pizzas at once and remotely track the temperature from your phone. As Ragusea put it: “Men love their fucking toys.”
Tools and gadgets can only take you so far. Even with the fanciest oven on the market, you still have to learn how to stretch the dough and get it into the oven without creating an oblong mess. “There’s all these special techniques involved in pizza that don’t apply to any other kind of cooking,” López-Alt said. If you want to learn, there are pizza forums, pizza Facebook groups, and so, so many pizza YouTube videos.
My first pizza, made in my kitchen oven, was so oversauced that it was more like tomato soup in a bread bowl. A ridiculous number of videos later, my pizza game has gone from JV to the big leagues. Pizza ovens beget videos on how to use them, begetting more interest in ovens, begetting more videos. It is a spin wheel of great pizza.
Even in the Ooni, my pizzas are not better or even that much cheaper than what you’d find in a great pizzeria, but they are mine. I get why my fellow pizza diehards gather online not only to hone their technique, but also to share their creations (even when they might give any Italian nonna a heart attack). Candied lemon and ricotta pizza! Mexican street corn pizza! Detroit-style Chongqing-chicken pizza topped with green onion and sesame seeds!
The irony of the pizza revolution is that this should be a moment for a pizza recession. Remember when the only thing you could get delivered was pizza, and maybe Chinese food? When you least wanted to cook, it was pizza time: In 2011, one of the biggest days for pizza eating was the day before Thanksgiving. Now you can DoorDash penne alla vodka or a pork banh mi. Yet Americans have fallen even deeper in love with pizza.
You can now find amazing pizza just about everywhere. Pizza pop-ups are opening using newer, larger versions of the cheap portable ovens. “Five years ago, if you wanted to open a mobile pizza company, then you would have to spend easily $5,000 on an oven and a trailer,” Wiener said. “Now you can spend half of that, and get two of these ovens.”
Still, the pizza sicko doesn’t always win. Recently, the pizza cravings got me late one evening. I fired up the Ooni, fiddled with the dough, and was ready to launch a pie when my hunger sapped my concentration. The dough had a hole in it, and disintegrated into sloppy goo in the oven. So much for that.
Part of getting a pizza oven is learning how to use it. The other part is learning when you should just leave it to the professionals.
This article appears in the January 2025 print edition with the headline “I’m a Pizza Sicko.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
