The Breville Smart Oven Pizzaiolo is an attention-getter. It promises to reach up to 750 degrees—about 30 percent hotter than most home ovens. That means that it’s theoretically possible to make restaurant-quality pizza (even approximating Neapolitan-style, which usually requires a scorching-hot wood-fired oven) at home. Up until now, two styles of indoor pizza ovens have been available to home cooks: huge, expensive options that require professional installation or small, countertop options that don’t work any better than a home oven. At about $1000, this oven comes with a big price tag, but it promises a lot. Does it deliver?
To find out, we bought one and threw a two-week pizza party in the test kitchen, testing six of the oven’s seven preprogrammed settings for baking different kinds of pizza as well as roasting vegetables. (The seventh setting, “350°F,” is designed for reheating pizza and we didn’t test it.) First, we baked frozen pizzas. (It may sound silly to bake frozen pizzas in a $1,000 pizza oven, but we wanted to test the oven’s “Frozen” setting.) Next, we tested the “Pan” setting by making pizza in the carbon-steel pan that comes with the machine, the “New York” and “Thin & Crispy” settings by making our recipe for Thin-Crust Pizza—both plain cheese and loaded with toppings, and the “Wood Fired” setting by making Neapolitan-style pizza. Finally, we roasted broccoli rabe and asparagus at the “750°F” setting to see how the oven handled foods other than pizza. When applicable, we compared pizzas and vegetables we baked in the Pizzaiolo to pizzas and vegetables baked in a regular oven.
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