If you’re short on outdoor space, you might feel like you’re missing out on the great pizza oven trend of the 2020s. For apartment dwellers, an outdoor, wood-powered pizza oven isn’t just unrealistic — it’s also a fire hazard.
Top pizza oven brands like Ooni and Gozney only offer outdoor pizza ovens. Sure, you could grab one and take it on your next camping trip, but you can’t be sure that only using it away from home would justify the prices. The next best thing? The Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo.
Breville’s nifty electric pizza oven gets hot enough to recreate that wood-fired taste and feel and doesn’t require outdoor space. You can plop it right on your kitchen counter or plug it in on the patio, and you’ll be just minutes away from cheesy, crispy Neapolitan-style pizzas.
How hot does the Breville Pizzaiolo get?
The Breville Pizzaiolo reaches up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. This isn’t nearly as hot as your standard wood-fired outdoor oven (those can top out at up to 900 degrees), but it’s still way hotter than most in-home appliances. Conventional ovens and convection ovens both tend to top out at around 500 or 550 degrees, so they really can’t compare to the Pizzaiolo.
Higher temperatures yield better crust results, and some types of pizza (namely, the Neapolitan type with the crisp, blackened crust) require super high temps to get the correct crust texture. With a higher-temp oven, you can get a crispy bottom crust, a well-browned top crust, retain moisture on the inside of the crust, and cook all the toppings.
What settings does the Breville Pizzaiolo have?
The Pizzaiolo boasts seven preset functions: 350 degrees, frozen, pan, New York, thin & crispy, "wood-fired," and 750 degrees. It also has a manual mode that allows you to set the top and bottom deck temperatures separately, and a knob for preferred crust darkness from light to dark. You can also use the built-in timer (up to 20 minutes) to control your cook times.
Does the Breville Pizzaiolo make good pizza?
The pizzas I made in the Breville Pizzaiolo were the best home-cooked pizzas I’ve ever had. Honestly, they rivaled (or were better than) some of the restaurant pizzas I’ve had in the past, too. It takes a while to get the temperature settings just right so you have a crispy bottom crust, cooked-through top crust, and perfectly melty cheese, but once you master it, you’re golden. While I cooked pizza on every setting, I played around with the "wood-fired" setting and the manual setting the most, and found that those two options yielded the best crust textures.
The Neapolitan-style crust recipes I tried cooked the best in the Pizzaiolo, but it took some finagling with the temperatures to get the crust textures right. Each pizza cooks in about three minutes or less, so there’s not a ton of time to experiment. I thought about the process a little like cooking pancakes — the first one was never perfect.
Is the Breville Pizzaiolo worth it?
The Breville Pizzaiolo is ideal for families who host, amateur chefs who love experimenting with new kitchen appliances, and anyone who identifies as a Big Pizza Guy. It makes great pizzas in just a few minutes, and doesn't require you to know how to light a fire (or keep one at the perfect temperature while you cook) like a traditional wood-fired pizza oven does. Since it controls the temperature for you, it’s way faster and easier to get pizzas in the oven and on the table.
Though at a glance, the Pizzaiolo doesn’t seem like the most versatile appliance, I could see it being a great high-heat oven to roast vegetables, meats, and anything you want that charred, wood-fired flavor on.
Aside from the high price, the only downside of the Breville Pizzaiolo is that it's hard to clean. Like other Breville appliances I've tested, the inside tended to stain and get discolored with use (even when wiped down between uses), so it won't always look as perfect as it does right out of the box. The pizza stone was also hard to get completely clean, but that's sort of the nature of pizza stones.
At $999, the Smart Oven Pizzaiolo is pricey, but it compares pretty closely to some of the other large pizza ovens on the market (like the Gozney Dome) and is way simpler and easier to use.
