Review: Ooni Volt 12

Adrienne So

8/10

I've reviewed pizza ovens for several years now, and at this point it's not an overstatement to say that Ooni has revolutionized the art of the home wood-fired pizza. If you craved a Neopolitan-style pie before Ooni, you had to build an enormous brick oven in your backyard, or jury-rig your home oven or charcoal grill with slate tiles or crazy high-heat contraptions.

Ooni's ovens, on the other hand, are fast, convenient, and easy enough that my 8-year-old now knows how to use them herself. (She does not. She is always under my direct supervision.) I've taken the Fyra camping and used the Koda to make myself a quick-seared salmon filet for lunch on a weekday in five minutes. But of all these fast and convenient ovens, the Volt 12 is the easiest to use by far.

In fact, the only downside is that the Volt is so matter-of-fact, so bloodless in operation, that you will barely realize that the cooking surface is hotter than the surface of the sun. Part of the appeal of a pizza oven is impressing your friends and frightening yourself with leaping flames and sizzling cast irons. For that thrill, you might just have to buy a dirt bike instead.

The Volt 12 is Ooni's first electric oven. Not only that, it's an indoor/outdoor oven. In theory, this makes it that much more versatile. But it's about 2 feet deep and almost 20 inches wide. It could fit on my counter, but Breville's Pizzaiolo oven (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is much more reasonably sized, at 18 inches deep. Anyway, our counters are already covered with half-drunk cups of cold coffee and half-eaten bags of Tostitos.

No matter--I have a patio with an outdoor table that's next to an accessible three-prong outlet. I will note here that my patio is covered, but Ooni does sell a weatherproof cover separately for $60; Ooni cautions you to store it indoors, in dry conditions, when not in use.

The Volt 12 was ready to go once I took it out of the box. All I had to do was slide in the 13-inch cordierite baking stone, plug it in, and heat it for 20 minutes to season it, or bake anything nasty off the cooking surface.

The body has Ooni's distinctive dark-grey turtle-like shape, made from stainless steel in a shell of powder-coated carbon steel that, again, insulates it remarkably. I can rest my hand on the top of the oven while it's going full blast and it just barely feels warm. The door is made from triple-paned, insulated borosilicate glass that seems designed to invoke deliberate comparisons to the Pizzaiolo, whose door is merely double-paned. It can also heat up to 850 degrees Fahrenheit (Pizzaiolo can only go up to 750 degrees, the losers!).

The door has three knobs on it. These knobs, unfortunately, did take me a little longer to figure out than the Pizzaiolo's, which come with convenient presets for different kinds of pizza. The one on the far left is a timer, the one in the middle is the temperature, and the one on the far right is what Ooni calls a Boost mode, which allows you to transfer heat back and forth between the top and bottom heating elements for different purposes.

If you like your cheese slightly browned, you can turn the heat up; if you've been baking a lot of pizzas, opening the door a lot, and moving dough in and out quickly, you can keep turning the dial to transfer heat back to the bottom. It's a simple function, but the symbols on the dial are weirdly obscure.

It is insane how quickly the oven preheats. I will caution here that I do recommend waiting a full hour for the stone to heat all the way through, which will reduce the likelihood that your pizza dough will cool the cooking surface instantly and get stuck. But the first time I used the oven, I turned it on to 650 degrees (what Ooni recommends for a "New York-style" pizza) and walked inside to pull ingredients out of the fridge. By the time I walked back out 13 minutes later, it was ready. This is less time than it takes my conventional indoor oven to reach 400 degrees.

The main difference between the Pizzaiolo and the Volt 12 is philosophical. The specs on the Volt are just objectively better than those of the Pizzaiolo, but more than that, the Pizzaiolo lives exclusively indoors and has presets. While it does have a manual mode that lets you play pizza baker and hover around the oven, anxiously rotating the pie yourself so that it browns crusts perfectly all over, you don't really need to. It does feel like playacting. By the time I finished my testing period with the Pizzaiolo, I just made dough, punched a preset, and walked away. It's the ideal oven if you're a busy working parent with small children.

The Volt 12 does have an essentials booklet that lets you pick which style of pizza you want and plug in the timer and the temperature setting. It's not that hard, and it does give the oven a little more versatility. For example, I just learned what grandma-style pizza is, as opposed to Detroit-style (someone will undoubtedly correct me, but as far as I understand it, grandma-style is thinner).

However, it's not really plug-and-play. I found myself hovering and tweaking Boost to get the cheese and crusts just right, and you can't just walk away--hosting friends over for pizza can sometimes be a mixed bag because by the time you're three beers deep, it's hard to pay close attention to your crisping dough. Functionally speaking: I found that if nothing is flashing and you can see the balance on the dial, Boost is available.

The temperature is also slightly harder to manage because the door and the opening to the cooking surface are both very small. It takes a lot of electrical energy to maintain the heat this high. Every time the door opened, I used an infrared thermometer to measure the temperature of the cooking surface. It usually dropped by about 50 degrees in the process of transferring pizzas. That just doesn't happen in a lot of outdoor ovens that don't even have a door; yes, the area near the door is cooler, but that's why you rotate your pizza.

With all that said, my family now treats the Volt like one of our own. Over the past few weeks, we've hosted multiple pizza bake-offs, including a World's Tiniest Pizza competition where the winner was a tiny blob of mozzarella on top of a fingernail-sized piece of dough. Nothing has come out burned or bad.

The Volt 12 gives you the experience of baking pizza--really baking it and not just punching a button--without mess or hassle, or having to refill the propane tank or run to the hardware store for cherrywood chunks. Eventually, this might be the oven we use to give our daughter the chance to bake a pie all by herself! Just not quite yet.