What to Cook in an Ooni Pizza Oven, According to Its Founders

If you have a pizza oven of any kind, you can go ahead and thank Ooni. Since Ooni debuted the first portable pizza oven in 2012 — a wood-fired model not unlike the bestselling Karu 12 — dozens of more options have entered the market, including gas and electric models. We’ve brought more than 30 pizza ovens to our lab to date, and while we’ve found some strong contenders, Ooni continues to top our tests for both outdoor and indoor pizza ovens.

While pizza ovens have become more and more popular among home cooks, I imagine just as many people have asked how often they’d actually use one. (I know I have.) When you’re delegating valuable space on the kitchen counter or a small patio, a single-use appliance may seem less compelling. But I’d compare our favorite pizza ovens to good grills — they can hit a range of temperatures for different cooking styles, and some even have dual zones, like one of Ooni’s newest outdoor ovens, the Koda 2 Max. And after speaking with Ooni’s founders, I can confidently say their pizza ovens can handle a lot more than pizza.

Ooni Koda 2 Max Pizza Oven

Ooni

Ooni started in Scotland as the brainchild of husband and wife Kristian Tapaninaho and Darina Garland. The founders regularly visit Ooni’s U.S. headquarters in Austin, Texas, where I live, and on their most recent trip, I got to ask them all of my (burning) pizza oven questions. Like, what exactly can you do with an Ooni besides making pizza? As it turns out, a lot. Here are their top tips.

Beyond Baking

If you want to do as much with a pizza oven as possible, the Koda 2 Max has two pizza stones and two burners that you can set to different temperatures. This oven’s patent-pending design achieves next-level even heating, according to Tapaninaho. “You can get away with a single turn of the pizza, which you can’t do on any of our competitors’ ovens, let alone a traditional oven,” he says. That means you can fire up a Neapolitan-style pizza recipe on one side and, on the other, a New York-style pie at a lower temperature. But it doesn’t stop there: Sourdough loaves, bagels, and chocolate chip cookies all bake beautifully in the Ooni, too.

Baking is just one option. “With the dual cooking surfaces, you can do extravagant roasts with a bread dish on the side, and in the back, you can also have a tray of vegetables,” says Garland. “Cooking things like salmon, steak, or vegetables quickly, it’s like restaurant quality. We didn’t design it for that, but it’s such a useful add-on.”

Roasting

“I love very quickly cooking vegetables on cast iron,” says Garland, who eats a vegan diet. “It’s honestly game-changing to do asparagus, peppers, and onions. In our domestic oven, it would take about 20 minutes plus to do it well, but in the Ooni, you can do it in three minutes with olive oil and salt. It’s so crisp but perfectly cooked. The same applies to things like salmon. People are big about that.”

Ooni designed a stainless steel roasting pan for the job, which you can use for basically anything. “The roasting pan has been around for ages, but we found that none of them worked really well in our ovens,” says Tapaninaho. This one has a removable rack with thick grates that can stand up to high heat (up to 750°F) without warping. If you’re roasting meat, you’ll love the wooden carving board that fits on top of the pan, as it has grooves and a slot to drain the juices back into the pan to minimize the mess.

Smoking

Tapaninaho loves smoking meat on the Ooni. He’ll put a 2-inch steak, like a bone-in prime rib, in the roasting pan and cook it low and slow for around an hour until it reaches about 120°F. He then takes out the roasting pan to let the steak rest before turning the heat back to high. “As you’re getting the oven back up to super high temperatures, get the cast iron into the oven so that it’s really hot, then throw the steak onto the cast iron in the oven,” he says. “Quickly sear both sides. It’s awesome.”