ooni Review 2024

My husband’s hitherto unknown, but apparently deep-seated, yen to make pizza first revealed itself two summers ago. Nick and I had been invited to a friend’s Hudson Valley country house for an idyllic afternoon; we swam in their pool, walked through their flower-filled meadows. At a certain point the friend excused himself to prep some pizza. Soon he was sliding margherita pies into a massive white-domed, brick-lined, Italian-made, wood-burning outdoor pizza oven that blistered the dough in mere seconds. We sat down to eat, and I could see Nick falling in love over the combination of homemade sauce, fresh basil and imported pepperoncini oil.

My husband is someone whose usual pizzas are mangled rhomboids wrestled from Trader Joe’s pizza dough. And yet he has never met a gadget he didn’t like, from his cycling Garmin to his guitar amps (plural). Naturally he began doing heavy research into pizza ovens, a deep dive that took him into the world of multi-thousand-dollar Italian ovens that require the type of outdoor space usually called “grounds” and deep, deep pockets. Since neither of those are our reality, eventually a link to the Ooni Karu 12 Multi-Fuel Pizza Oven appeared in my inbox a month or two before his birthday, a not-so-subtle hint. It’s not exactly cheap at $399, but it’s safe to say I have been repaid many times over by my new personal pizza chef.

The allure of the Ooni Karu is that it’s wood-fired, so you’re getting the same culinary experience as a built-in pizza oven, albeit in miniature. The first step is learning how to heat the Ooni to an eyebrow-searing 950 degrees Fahrenheit. Nick uses an ax to shave slivers of wood from our logs (you can use wood chips or pellets) and then mixes them with lump charcoal in the little fuel hopper in the back of the oven. You can buy the $100 gas burner attachment, of course, but where’s the fun in that when you can spend hours in the rain, holding an umbrella over your oven, watching YouTube videos of how Scottish men got their Oonis to heat up in the Highland gloom? 

He also determined he had to learn how to make sauce. And dough. From scratch. “The Elements of Pizza” by Ken Forkish became his bible, and he learned to make 48- and 24-hour dough and different types of pizza sauce. Interestingly, the best sauce has just two ingredients, canned tomatoes and salt. Assembling the Ooni is nearly as easy—all you have to do is attach the legs and chimney, then slide the pizza stone into the bottom of the oven. lean-up is a cinch too: Just keep the heat up for 30 minutes, and it burns off everything inside the oven so you can easily wipe it down with a damp cloth. 

Now that he’s learned his way around the basics and the Ooni itself, Nick wows our dinner guests with prosciutto and hot honey or fig and arugula or mushroom and pepperoni pies. The pizzas cook in barely 90 seconds, one at a time; you rotate the pie a quarter turn about every 15 to 20 seconds, which gives the thin crust just the right type of char, something no gas grill can replicate. (The only limit to our gluttony is the amount of dough balls he’s made and how quickly he can roll them out and get them into the oven.) We’ve been using the Ooni mostly on our back patio, but I like knowing it’s portable and easy to store: For an extra $40 you can purchase the cute storage bag with handles that fits over the legs and covers the little chimney to keep it nice for years to come.