Ah, the age old question: ‘how should I cook my pizza?’ It feels like there’s an obvious answer, right? And that’s ‘in a pizza oven.’
The thing is, pizza ovens are expensive. I’m currently using the Ooni Karu 2, which is Ooni’s entry-level outdoor oven, but still costs $449. It’s utterly fantastic (as you’ll see) but a major outlay of cash.
So I decided to see if I could get good results with a cheaper alternative. My YouTube Shorts feed is absolutely chocked full of people making pizza in their home ovens using pizza steels. See, while people have been using pizza stones in their home ovens for a long time, and stones are employed ubiquitously in actual pizza ovens, it’s steels that are the ‘in’ thing right now. That’s because steel is preferable when using a conventional home oven: in the lower temperature of your kitchen oven, steel conducts heat much more effectively than stone, for a better cook on the pizza base.
If my YouTube algorithm is anything to go by, you don’t need that fancy Ooni or Gozney pizza oven. You just need a steel. So I ran some back-to-back tests — all in the name of science, of course — to see if my algo was playing tricks on me. Is it worth saving money by just getting a steel instead?
First, a couple of caveats
Remember, everyone’s kitchen oven is different, so your results may not match mine. I’m also aware that pizza steels were never meant to be a full stand-in for a proper oven.
This article is primarily intended to show you the pros and cons of both methods as I experienced them, to help you make your mind up as to which you’d rather go for.
Competitors
Alrighty. Let’s take a look at our competitors. The pizza oven I’m using is the Ooni Karu 2. This is Ooni’s entry-level multi-fuel outdoor oven and very similar to the older Karu 12 — it has a glass door, while the Karu 12 had a metal door. I’m currently testing the Karu 2 for our full review, but spoiler alert: it’s fantastic. The Karu 2 can run on wood, charcoal or gas (via an adapter), making it extremely versatile.
The steel I’m using is the Chef Pomodoro 14×12-inch pizza steel. It’s 1/4-inch thick so holds heat well, and measures 14×12-inches, which effectively means just 12 inches if you want round pizzas. It’s a simple piece of metal, which adds a level of versatility: it just goes in your conventional oven, meaning you can cook come rain or shine. As far as steels go, it’s a pretty good one in my book.
The oven I’m using is a Neff fan-assisted oven with a dedicated baking and pizza setting, which gets up to 275C or 527F — this is technically hot enough for low’n’slow pizzas, like New York-style.
Price
This one’s a no-brainer. If money is the driving factor here, the pizza steel is the way to go. At just under $53 / £60, this can be a totally safe impulse purchase, allowing you to experiment with making pizza at home while not breaking the bank.
The Ooni Karu 2, which is a fairly affordable pizza oven), costs $449 MSRP — although we’ve seen it drop to around $349 during recent sales events. In the U.K., it costs £349 RRP, although the 2023 model has dropped as low as £279 in the past.
You’ll need to add on a gas adapter if you want to cook with gas, which costs a whopping $112 / £90. Then there’s the price of fuel to consider, which is ongoing. To give you an idea of consumption: keeping up temperature for 5 pizzas on the Ooni required 2-3 handfuls of lumpwood charcoal and 5-6 small pieces of wood. Not much, but it adds up when using the oven regularly.
It’s worth remembering that both methods also require accessories. At a minimum, you need a peel to finish assembly and launch your pizza into the oven. Ideally, you’ll want a turning peel, too, to rotate the pizza without burning yourself and remove it from the oven. And it’s best to get yourself an infrared thermometer so you can measure the temperature of the pizza oven’s stone/the steel to see when they’re ready to cook.
I’ve been using the Ooni 12-inch Bamboo peel ($40), Ooni Turning Peel ($65) and Ooni Infrared Gun ($65), so you can see how quickly those accessories ramp up the price. Ooni offers bundles, but they’re still fairly pricey. The Ooni accessories are fantastic quality, but my advice when starting out would simply be to buy cheaper alternatives online, like this bamboo peel ($18), aluminum turning peel ($18) and infrared temperature gun ($29). Start with a bamboo peel and go from there when needed, as you get more experience.
Winner: Pizza steel
Ease of use
Again, this one goes to the steel. For a start, pizza ovens need building. The Ooni Karu 2 took me around 15 minutes to build — it was incredibly simple with a helpful assembly manual included and a video guide online. Some viewers commented that the online video instructions are little misleading, making it easy to damage a metal lip under the oven door. I didn’t have this issue, though, as the included assembly manual was very clear.
Outdoor ovens can’t really be left outside uncovered, either, which means I have to get mine out of my garage each time I want to cook — you can buy covers, but you mustn’t leave the stone outside in very extreme temperatures. And while you could uncover and use the Karu 2 in the rain, you’d really want some form of shelter over you, which is an extra consideration. You can buy indoor pizza ovens like the Ooni Volt 2, but the pizza steel can be used rain or shine for much less money.
Then there’s the prep/fueling, followed by the cleaning after use. It’s time consuming, although not really any different to prepping for a BBQ, and I find cleaning the stone and pizza oven easier than shifting burnt-on crud from the steel.
Nevertheless, the pizza steel is just much simpler. All I needed to do was unwrap it, wipe it down and then get cooking. It’s a heavy old beast, which makes it cumbersome to handle. The counter benefit is that the steel is much tougher and virtually immune to fractures, although you’ll need to season it from time to time to avoid rust, like a cast iron.
I find it much easier to launch pizzas onto the steel because of my oven’s large door. That said, launching is mostly down to your peel, technique and flour/semolina dusting. With a few launches under your belt there’s no real difference here between a steel and pizza oven.
Winner: Pizza steel
Heat up
This is where the Ooni Karu 2 starts to pull ahead. Heating up is extremely quick. From lighting my fuel to the stone surface hitting 400C (and being ready to cook) took around 12 minutes. Much quicker than I was expecting.
By contrast, the Chef Pomodoro steel is, well, a huge hunk of steel, and therefore takes much longer to heat up. It’s ready to cook by around 45 minutes. Now, this may be down to my individual oven, but after 45 minutes at full temperature with a chunk of steel inside, my Neff oven started to overheat and shut itself down. I simply turned it off and on again, the error warning disappeared, and I started to cook (as, luckily, the steel was at temperature by then). My oven couldn’t then handle back to back pizzas though.
Winner: Pizza oven
Cook
Of course, the most important part of this comparison is the cook! There are two main types of pizza to consider here: Neapolitan, which is cooked very hot and fast; and New York-style or low’n’slow, which is cooked at a cooler temperature for longer.
I tested both styles on both cook methods, using Peddling Pizza‘s dough recipe. For Neapolitan-style pizzas, I used fresh, drained mozzarella; and for New York-style I used dry pizza mozzarella. I used my own sauce recipe, which is just one can of Rega San Marzano tomatoes, with a teaspoon each of salt and sugar, plus half a teaspoon each of dried oregano and basil.
Image 1 of 2
The pizza steel in a home oven simply cannot cook Neapolitan-style pizza. Your oven just doesn’t get hot enough for the air bubbles in the dough to rapidly expand and create that puffy but light crust. Pizzas therefore come out quite dense.
However, using a steel does a fair job at low’n’slow styles (you’ll want to make sure you tailor your dough to this: NY and Neapolitan can use similar hydration levels, but Chicago and deep-dish need a higher ratio of water). I was pretty happy with the NY-style(-ish) Margheritas I made using the steel, as well as some pepperoni pies, a grandma pizza and even a deep dish. The base and crust were always cooked nicely, with a good chewiness to them. Pizzas took around 10-12 minutes to cook.
I had one annoying issue, which may be down to my individual oven: I sometimes found I couldn’t get ambient temperatures hot enough to cook the top of the pizza adequately without risking overdoing the crust, resulting in overly wet tops. I tried turning on the broiler to help… but doing so caused my oven to overheat again.
It kinda figures: home ovens just aren’t designed to cook pizzas.
Image 1 of 2
The Ooni Karu 2 can do just about everything. Most importantly, it’s an absolute weapon for Neapolitan pizzas. At 400C/750F, it’ll cook you a pizza in as little as 90 seconds, and they come out perfectly: puffy, light crusts; crispy bases; and deftly cooked tops. With wood-burning ovens, you’ll want to chuck a piece of wood in the fuel tray just before you launch, as this gets some flames licking over the top to cook toppings (especially raw meats like sausage). Gas-fired ovens like the Gozney Arc Lite do this for you, ensuring there’s a flame always licking over the top.
I mostly cooked Neapolitan pies on my Ooni, cracking out a range of meaty (for me) and vegetarian (for my wife) pizzas. It gets a little tricky to manage the heat on a solid fuel oven, which was a minor issue when cooking five pizzas for my friends. After two, the temperature dropped and I was forced to cook at lower heats to keep bringing out food. This wasn’t a huge issue, and I even used it to my advantage, doing low’n’slow pizzas instead to get the cheese super bubbly and brown. Compare that to the steel, which overheated my oven after a single pizza.
If you have a cast iron, like my 12-inch Field Company No. 10 Cast Iron Skillet, you can also pare back the Ooni’s heat and cook deep dish or Chicago style pies. I’ve yet to try these, but they’re next on the agenda. It’s super versatile.
Winner: Pizza oven
Verdict
The steel is obviously better for price and ease of use, but when it comes to the most important stuff: heating up and cooking, the pizza oven wins hands down.
If you’re just starting out and/or on a budget, and looking for a simple way to make pizza that’s better than store-bought, get the steel. It’ll help you learn a lot about dough, prep and techniques like launching. And you can make some enjoyable pies, which definitely count as good ‘oven pizzas’. But the results aren’t restaurant standard.
If you want to make genuinely amazing pizza, akin to or better than that you’d buy from a pizzeria or restaurant, you need to spend a little extra for a pizza oven. In my experience, the difference really is night and day.
The reactions to my pizzas tell the story pretty well. With the steel-baked pies, it was usually something along the lines of: “oh, this is actually pretty good.” With my pizza oven pies, it was more like: “holy crap, this is incredible. Cook another, right now.”
So, here’s my verdict on pizza steels. While I wanted this cheap, viral solution to work, unfortunately they just don’t quite get there.
Follow Tom’s Guide on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our up-to-date news, analysis, and reviews in your feeds. Alternatively, you can read our content on the Tom’s Guide app available now for iOS and Android. Subscribe to Tom’s Guide on YouTube and follow us on TikTok. Finally, you can visit our dedicated Tom’s Guide Savings Squad hub for expert help on getting the best products for less.