Ooni Karu 16

Wow awesome pizza oven and amazing customer service – The next best thing to building a pizza oven in your back yard. Better in my view. Multi-fuel - gas flame or wood burning (NOTE! gas requires additional spend for a gas burner accessory) My review is based on using gas. I haven't tried wood burning yet. If you want to get a little more serious with your pizza making and cooking skills this is a pretty good way to step up your game. At least the cooking part. This doesn't make pizza dough. This oven's design emulates how a traditional pizza oven works. Stone cooking surface, shaped to make the flame flow over the top of the pizza and heat up the oven properly, all clothed in a modern, great looking design that's reasonably portable. The glass door and the oven thermometer are additional modern touches to enhance the experience. Once up to heat this oven cooks pizza beautifully. Read the instructions carefully. Watch videos of the oven in use. These will help you to get a great cooking experience. If you don't and just bung in a pizza you're not going to be very impressed. This is not an automated, no-brain experience, you need to understand how the oven cooks and the cooking process and be patient. If you can't be bothered, don't waste your money, just call Dominos. Ooni recommends getting an infra-red thermometer gun to check the stone temperature. You can get by fine without one. Once the thermometer reaches recommended temperature, keep heating for another 10 mins that will ensure stone temperature has caught up, as the thermometer only records ambient temp, not stone temp. Ooni advertises that the oven can cook a pizza in 60s or so. That's largely true when all the temperatures are at recommended but like any cooking process variables such as your pizza dough, etc play a part - in a nutshell though, this cooks a pizza very quickly. With practice you can get a pizza out that looks like restaurant quality. Puffy crust, perfectly cooked base, bubbling cheese and the 'leopard spot' charring. Again, your dough making skills play a bit part here.

The oven is heavy, fully assembled. If you need to move it, take the stones out first, that makes it much easier to move. The top and side surfaces get real hot but there's not much heat emanating from the bottom (can quite safely put your hand/arm under the oven gap with the table) which means you don't need to sit the oven on a heatproof surface. Just something solid is fine. The gas burner accessory fits into the back of the oven. It's easily removable for wood-burning. A less than ideal design choice was to make the burner control at the back of the oven making it somewhat awkward to manage heat control by having to walk around to the back, and you then can't see the flame level from back there - unless you lift up the rear hatch. There's some serious heat coming out of the chimney so if you set up on a covered porch/deck, be aware of how much heat is hitting your porch ceiling. You might need to set up out from under cover. Although it's an outdoor unit, consider buying the cover - yes, more money but it will help protect the unit from the weather when not in use, after all this isn't cheap oven. Customer service - excellent. We purchased directly off the Ooni website and accidently purchased an extra gas hose and Ooni customer support resolved that quickly and nicely. We then had a problem with the burner not staying alight. Again, excellent service and the issue was resolved quickly. NOTE it looks like there's a new model out which appears to replace this model with very similar look but updated touches. Not yet available on the AU website.