Pizza at home can be tricky. For years I settled on ‘cook from frozen’ mass produced ones that could get chucked in the oven and would come out…well, barely acceptable. I’ve loved pizza my whole life, and in the digital age of today, it has never been easier to get one delivered to the door from a local restaurant. It might taste amazing, but your wallet is going to feel it. Rising costs means a takeaway pizza could be around $30 per pizza. That’s not something I can grab every week, so I set out to cook at home. 

Whilst I was in awe at some of the large format consumer pizza ovens out there, some cost several thousand dollars, would take up valuable space in my back yard, would take upwards of 45 minutes to heat up and chew through fuel like a V8 at the servo. I realised I needed something that was quick to heat up, efficient and didn’t take up too much space. Enter the Kenwood My Pizzeria Pizza Oven. Its compact size means it can sit on the worktop without taking too much space. It’s about the size of an airfryer and weighs less than 5kg, so very movable if I was keeping it in a drawer or kitchen cupboard. It houses a 30cm ceramic pizza stone that is the perfect size for an at-home pizza. The other benefit of being a compact size is that it takes barely any time to heat up. Using dual sided heating elements, once you plug it in it can preheat the stone in about 10 mins so you’re ready to cook quickly – much quicker than the large format ovens in the market.

I used homemade dough and found that it could cook incredibly quickly; 2-3 minutes per pizza. By the time one was on and cooking, I was taking requests for toppings for the next one to go in, and when I finished dressing, I was popping a freshly cooked pizza onto the cutting board and getting ready to slice it up for my friends and family. The results were truly great. A puffy light crust, caramelised toppings and perfectly melted cheese. I was able to replicate this several times, just give the stone about a minute between pizzas to recover some heat if you’re cooking for a crowd!

The compact and lightweight build of this pizza oven means we can easily take it out to the back patio to use on our outdoor table (connected with an extension lead). Now that we’re coming into the warmer weather, it’s enjoyable to cook and eat outside.

The My Pizzeria Pizza Oven comes with two pizza peels for easy transportation of the pizza from your prep space to the stone, a very nice inclusion for beginners, or people that want to have a go at cooking pizza in a more specialist way, rather than a domestic oven or a BBQ.

Overall it’s hard to see many products that can compete with the Kenwood My Pizzeria Pizza Oven for the home cook that wants to dip their toe into the world of specialty pizza. Today’s RRP of $149 represents incredible value for a worktop appliance that performs as well as it does and yields delicious pizza, cooked at home for a fraction of the cost of takeaway. We are proud to recommend this product as an outstanding option for someone to take their at-home pizza game to a new level.