Dining in with the Ooni Electric Pizza Oven

Pizza is a food that we all fantasise about, but how often has our excitement been dampened by a slightly limp takeaway or a store-bought disc that totally misses the mark? It’s time to stop wasting time on anything that isn’t the real deal – get ready to meet your pizza maker, the Ooni oven.

Ooni pizza ovens were designed to help people make authentic and delicious wood-fired pizza in their own homes. They’re easy to use and the results are crisp, golden and utterly delicious.

From wood-fired to gas-powered, each Ooni model has its unique qualities that contribute towards pizza perfection. Today, we’re putting one of those ovens to the test. Join us for a slice of the action as we try out the Ooni Volt 12 Electric Pizza Oven.

Ooni Volt 12 Electric Pizza Oven

With this gadget, you won’t have to wait for good weather to experience a little taste of Italy. With the Ooni Volt 12, you can whip up authentic Neapolitan-style pizzas in minutes. Even if the sun doesn’t make an appearance, it’s just as easy to set this oven up indoors as it is out. It’s electric heating elements means it’s compact and portable, so you can hoist it from countertop to garden patio effortlessly.

But the features we’re really looking forward to testing out are the rapid heating (450°C in 20 minutes!) and 90 second pizza cook time. Let’s see how our Ooni Volt 12 got on.

Getting our Ooni oven to the right temperature

Before we can start making pizza with the Ooni Electric, it needs to be properly set up. A sturdy, level surface is the only place we want to be testing this out. Ooni actually make their own oven stands for just this purpose, but we used an outdoor dining table that was in easy reach of a plug socket. The power cord for this oven is pretty short, having an outdoor plug meant we didn’t have to risk the long and dangerous cord trails of an extension cable.

Once plugged in, we opted to pump the heat up to a scorching 450°C, the highest setting and a lot more than what our regular oven can do.

We set the timer for 20 minutes, at which point the LED was telling us that the oven had reached temperature. But we left it for a few more minutes while we added the finishing touches and toppings to our pizzas.

Prepare our pizza dough

While your electric pizza oven is heating up, you can start preparing your dough and chosen ingredients. Intimidated by the technicalities of sourdough, we wanted to make a simple base. Earlier in the day, we tried out Ooni’s classic pizza dough recipe. Now it was ready to stretch into shape (no, we didn’t spin it above our heads like the pro chefs).

Whether homemade or shop-bought, we recommend making your base nice and thin. Remember this pizza is going to take (we hope) just 90 seconds to cook! If it’s too thick, it’ll be too squidgy and might need longer in the oven to reach crispy-base perfection.

Because we were really committing to the experiment, we even topped our Ooni base with Ooni sauce, using the recipe they’d shared. Good quality ingredients are key, and our courgette and cherry tomato pizza used nothing but the finest veg and cheese. Ooni have loads of flavour inspiration here, from classic margarita to Sunday roast leftovers. Or you can go straight to the source, with their ‘Cooking with Fire’ cookbook.

Showtime – cooking the pizza

Ok, once we were finished faffing, it was time to get our treasure into the oven. This electric pizza oven gets seriously hot and it’s worth getting a short pizza peel to slide the base in quickly and easily. To stop the pizza sticking to the peel, we dusted it with a handful of flour.

It was easy to keep an eye on how the pizza was crisping up. Through the glass window, we watched our toppings bubble and turn gold. After about 40 seconds, we used the peel to jiggle the pizza out and turn it, giving the front a chance to sizzle. We did this twice during cooking to try and make sure every crust was cooked evenly.

It took about 90 seconds for our pizza top to look properly molten and perfectly cooked. Right at the end, we changed the ‘heat balance’ using one of the dials. This basically means we upped the heat in the bottom of the oven, tipping the ‘balance’ of the heat away from the top. On this setting, we gave it a final 30 second blast to ensure that we’d get the crispy base we so wanted.

Enjoying our homemade pizza!

Once our pizza was cooked, we let it cool for a moment before slicing it up – and it was everything we’d wanted it to be!

The power of an electric pizza oven is a revelation. We’d definitely recommend taking this Ooni indoor pizza oven for a spin before spending thousands of pounds on an old-fashioned pizza oven.

From now on, this is our preferred way creating delicious pizza in our own back garden. Heaven.