Pizza oven guide
Get the oven you have ready: preheat, stone readings, launch, turns and recovery between pizzas. Or see which of 18 exact models, and your kitchen oven, bake the styles you want.
Which oven are you baking in?
Pick the exact model. Similar names can have different instructions.
Your kitchen oven
Outdoor pizza ovens
Indoor countertop
Drawings are for finding your oven, not to scale.
Oven setting or stone reading?
Recipes give one of two kinds of temperature, and the guide keeps them apart. For a kitchen oven, the number is the setting: heat a steel or stone at the hottest setting the oven allows, usually 500 to 550°F (260 to 288°C), for 45 to 60 minutes. An electric pizza oven such as the Breville Pizzaiolo has its own presets and ready signal, so the coach follows that model's manual instead. For an outdoor gas or wood oven, the number is the temperature of the stone itself, read with an infrared thermometer. A Neapolitan-style pizza in those ovens is planned for a stone at about 750 to 840°F (400 to 450°C), adapted from Ooni's published method.
That's why the coach asks different questions for different ovens. Kitchen and electric pizza ovens get a preheat clock and the oven's own ready signal, confirmed again before every pizza. An outdoor oven gets three readings. Ovens we haven't adapted a recipe for, including some outdoor electric models, point you to the maker's own instructions.
Why three readings
An oven can say it's ready before it is. In Modernist Pizza's infrared photographs, an oven that had signalled it was ready after 22 minutes still had clear cold spots, which is why the authors recommend preheating for at least 30 minutes. A single reading can't show that. So the coach asks for the back, middle and front of the area the pizza will sit on, and calls the oven uneven when the readings fall on both sides of the range, since turning the heat up would only make the hot spot hotter.
Infrared thermometers have limits. Shiny or bare metal reads low on most of them, so a reading on a baking steel is approximate; use it to compare one bake with the next rather than to chase a number. More on that in the guide to infrared thermometers for pizza.
Turning and timing
The bake timer shows the recipe's bake window as a cue to look, not as a promise that the pizza is done. A turning cue appears only where the maker publishes one for that exact oven and style: Ooni's guide for the Koda 16 suggests turning a Neapolitan-style pizza every 20 to 30 seconds. Elsewhere, turn when one side colors faster than the other.
Choosing an oven
"Help me choose" filters by the styles you want to bake, where the oven will live, its fuel and your budget, then shows which exact models our recipes cover. Prices are the base oven only, as listed by the maker on the date shown; fuel, peels and covers cost extra. Where a maker doesn't publish a figure, the comparison says so rather than guessing. Your kitchen oven is listed separately, because adding a steel or stone is often the cheapest upgrade. See which baking steel to buy, Ooni vs. Roccbox vs. a home oven and Gozney Arc XL vs. Ooni Karu 2 Pro.
Sources
- Nathan Myhrvold and Francisco Migoya, Modernist Pizza (2021), volume 1, printed pages 389–393: preheating, cold spots and infrared photographs.
- Makers' product pages, manuals and recipe guides for each oven, linked in the tool. Oven facts and prices checked October 14, 2026.
- Recipe protocols: Ooni, King Arthur Baking, DeliVita and Breville's Pizzaiolo manual, as listed under each coached bake.