If you don’t happen to have a traditional stone-floored domed clay oven on hand, it can be surprisingly challenging to make a pizza that’s truly excellent. Your domestic oven does a reasonable job, but doesn’t really get hot enough. Even a specialist pizza oven such as [Yvo de Haas]’ Ooni doesn’t quite do the best possible, so he’s upgraded it with the SpinMeister — a system for precise timing of the heat, and controlled rotation of the cooking stone for an even result.
The spinning part is handled by a stepper motor, driving a hex shaft attached to the bottom of the stone through a chuck. The rotating bearing itself is from an aftermarket stone rotator kit. The controller meanwhile is a smart 3D printed unit with a vacuum-fluorescent display module, powered from an Arduino Nano. There’s a motor controller to handle driving the stepper, and an MP3 module for audible warning. It’s all powered from a USB-C powerbank, for true portability. He’s produced a video showing it cooking a rather tasty-looking flatbread, which we’ve placed below. Now for some unaccountable reason, we want pizza.
If you recognize [Yvo]’s name, then perhaps it’s because he’s appeared on these pages a few times. Whether it’s a tentacle robot or something genuinely different in 3D printing, his work never ceases to be interesting.
The idea is nice but launching a pizza into the oven on a round stone is quite a lot harder, at least if you want a decent sized pizza and not a tiny one… And to be honest, getting an evenly cooked pizza is not that hard to do with a turning peel
Sir, this is the hackaday website. We hack thing for the hacking heck of it. It’s a cool (well, hot actually ) hack.
We don’t want any pointlessnessless projects in these parts, thank you very much.
2 smaller pizzas are better than 1 large one. More crust, doesn’t collapse under it’s own weight and the second half of your meal is just as piping hot and crispy as the first part. Neapolitan style pizzas are not supposed to be large. It is hard to do with a turning peel. It cooks under a minute so if you stay a few seconds too long on one side you get asymmetry.
I know but its still pretty easy. I cook neapolitan style pizza every week. Never did i feel the need for something other than a turning peel to get the results i want
Great build. While there are many rotating pizza stone ovens on the market (2 available through Walmart) and portable as well, the VFD unit makes this far better. The spin rate and time selectors weren’t shown off in the video. Perhaps in time a scale could be added like the brownness selector on a toaster. However, pizza and pitas making are an art not well duplicated by a countertop “Piezano” cooker.
I want that VFD…
You’re in luck, I’m selling those on Tindie: https://www.tindie.com/products/nicolai/i2c-vacuum-fluorescent-display-vfd/
Nice. Cost isn’t too bad either. Too bad about the shipping cost though. Not prepared to pay the 3x that price for it.
Why not heat it with even IR from top
Then the crust doesn’t brown well
I looked at the front page. I saw the picture and the first thought in my head: “That’s a Dutch person”. And I was correct.
Also, “Your domestic oven does a reasonable job”. That’s incorrect. A major issue with making pizza’s in domestic ovens is that domestic ovens can’t get anywhere near the right temperature for pizza’s. To do it properly, you want your oven to be set at 500C/900F (the entire point of the pizza oven in the post is that it can get really hot). In the old days (and still nowadays in some places), a lot of villages in Italy had communal wood fired ovens. The first dishes were the hottest due to the nature of the ovens and they made flatbreads, pizza’s and other dishes that benefit from high temperatures. After that, the oven would slowly cool down and other dishes are placed in the oven. I remember this from a vacation to Italy when I was a child and I’ve seen Italian food YT’ers talk about it.
A domestic oven can make good pizzas. I can get almost as good pizzas in my oven as in my ooni, to the point where i often skip the ooni as using the oven is easier and better during bad weather. You need a pizza stone and the highest temperature, then a mix of grill-mode and normal mode. I’ve also had good success with hot air, some people will lead you to believe it would dry out the pizza but I don’t agree. Also, adding a pinch of olive oil to the dough can help with heat transfer, something not needed in a pizza oven.
A domestic oven cannot make top quality Neapolitan style pizza. If you are making pizza in your oven that you consider to be as good as what you get at 500˚C, then your pizza might not up to professional quality in either case, and possibly your Ooni is not running hot enough. The best Neapolitan pizza requires very, very high temperatures. I have tried hard to duplicate what I can do in a high heat oven in normal ovens and the results are invariably disappointing. BTW, olive oil does nothing whatsoever for heat transfer, though it is of course a fine addition to crusts.
“Well hello gatekeeper, may I ask where you are going with those goalposts?”
Face it, just like every other interest, your preferences don’t mean everyone else isn’t allowed to be happy. Most people don’t obsess about Neapolitan, they like common American pizzas that can certainly be made satisfactorily in a common American oven. And if the Italian immigrants who came up with them had thought them too terrible to be worth making, they had their chance to put a stop to the whole thing. But despite having had other kinds, apparently they liked these too.
If you don’t care, then this oven type has no point to it for you. The entire point of the Ooni is to make Neapolitan pizza at 500C. That’s the only reason this product exists. If you don’t want those pizza’s or care, don’t get one. You don’t buy a Ferrari if your demands are a reasonable prices, fuel efficient car that doesn’t draw much attention, just like you don’t buy an Ooni if you are happy with oven pizza’s.
So no, this isn’t gatekeeping, you are missing the entire point. This oven does not work for common American pizza’s. It’s for Italian pizza.
Apparently I am just going to keep on missing your point, because the topic of whether a domestic oven can make a reasonable pizza has nothing to do with any of this other stuff. It’s a simple question, can something that’s called pizza and tastes reasonably good come out of a regular oven? Yes, it can. All this about what can be done with the nicer ovens is a separate and much more relevant topic, but stopping to scoff at regular pizza is not. It’s like if a Ferrari guy couldn’t figure out how to compliment Ferrari’s except by saying that domestic cars are trash and terrible and don’t deserve to be called sports cars.
Yea preheating with the broiler / grill can get ovens stinking hot then switch over to normal modes at max and it’s hot as he’ll enough to make reasonable sized pizza or 2…
Where these dedicated things come into place is from 20 years ago where you are going to have a gaggle of people show up for a party and spend half the night roasting 6 inch pizza’s while maintaining a grill on your tiny ass city lot / rooftop
No one really wants to pretend they own a restaurant, it’s a dead fad like the poolside kitchen / bar l. You got the money for that bullshit you got enough for catering so you can mingle and swim and get blitzed rather than pretend your getting paid 9 buck an hour to run a joint
Most domestic ovens in the Netherlands are tiny microwave oven combos and they suck.
Depends on the type of pizza. I love Naples and actual Italian pizza and you are correct on that count, normal ovens aren’t hot enough.
For a pan pizza/Detroit style though home ovens are perfect.
For a nice crispy bottom, but fluffy detroit/pan style crust 550F and a cast iron pan is just right. Just be sure to use an oil on the bottom of the pan with a high smoke point (I use avocado oil) with longer cook times if you use olive oil it will burn (not the crust but the actual oil)
You can make Neapolitan-style pizza in a regular oven too if oyu maxx it out. See my post above.
I spent 2 years in italy and have done all the home oven tricks. Nah you can’t
I fully agree. You simply can’t. It requires the heat.
I don’t think you can make a top quality one. Some people believe you can, of course. I am not sure such people have had a perfectly charred and bubbling Neapolitan pizza.
Without detracting from the coolness of pizza ovens and this hack… yeah I’m here to confirm that good pizza can be made in a conventional oven.
The tricks are:
– a baking stone, preheated in the oven
– a spouse who’s a retired professional cook, who experiments with crust recipes, makes sauce from scratch, etc
– practice, especially with the putting in and taking out. Use lotsa flour or cornmeal.
A dedicated, wood-fired pizza oven would be awesome, but not attainable for most of us.
Having used pizza stones and steels at maximum heat in a home oven, I can testify how it’s vastly inferior than a proper pizza oven.
I dont like Ooni (and alike) as they need to be turned, and only works outside.
I now have an electric winner: Sage/Breville pizzaiolo smart oven, and boy that’s a game changer! (you will just miss the wooden smoked touch), but I hate it’s fan noise!
Strongly agreed that you simply cannot achieve the same results at low temperatures. The crust won’t bubble.
A baking stone fixes nothing. It’s basically a placebo. You need extremely high heat to get an adequate char and to get the crust to bubble properly. I have not seen anyone manage to do proper pizza at less than about 400˚C and you really want 500˚C. I have had many, many, many people tell me that their pizza is just as good made in a domestic oven. In several cases, I’ve tried to be as polite as possible after tasting it. In some cases, it has turned out that the person in question had no experience eating proper Neapolitan pizza and was comparing what they produced to mass chains like Pizza Hut that produce low quality pizza, and of course, one can indeed get something similar to that at home, but it’s not a proper Neapolitan pie at all.
BTW, just to be clear: most commercial restaurant pizza is terrible, and is not a reasonable point of comparison. It’s rare that people actually get to eat the real thing. The real thing has charred bubbles, leopard spotted crust, and a texture that is essentially impossible to get at low temperatures. The crust simply cannot bubble and char correctly at low temperatures; physics gets in the way. A pizza stone cannot fix this, because it cannot magically raise the surface temperature to higher than the temperature of the pizza stone.
Doesn’t matter who invented it.
The world eats American styles of pizza.
Not bread with a few toppings, cooked on a coffin wood fire.
Chicago stuffed for the win. Similar to Sicilian style but ‘even more’ IIRC.
Most domestic ovens in the Netherlands are tiny microwave oven combos and they suck. The ones that don’t suck cannot go past 230c due to strict EU regulations (ovens are not allowed to get hot on the outside or you might burn your fingers). I bought an electric pizza oven here and I had to remove the extra safety thermostat to get descent pizzas out of it. It can go to 400C, but the heating from the top is insufficient.
So now I want to buy a gas powered pizza oven like the one from the video. Unfortunately it is illegal to use such a oven outdoors where I live (balconies are not allowed to have grills or ovens on them or you can get kicked out of your apartment) and you cannot use them indoors.
But is it turning-complete?
It’s multiple turning-complete. Now ain’t that something!
No, it’s missing a pizz-a the recipe.
A good hack to use some extra parts laying around. I did have a concern to use outside without any weatherproofing or quick disconnect to bring inside, maybe he has a covered patio.
The is the same concept as the original Blackstone pizza oven (https://www.reddit.com/r/pizzaoven/comments/1ajb4t0/blackstone_pizza_oven_older_style_any_good/), but in a more compact and elegant form. I have the Blackstone and I don’t think it’s any more difficult launching a pie into it than it would be into an oven a stationary floor. Most of my launch failures have been a result of the pizza not fully leaving the peel, which I think would be just as likely to result in a disaster on a stationary stone.
I have a spare washing machine motor that runs at 15000 RPM. Wondering if that’s too much?
Just use a bit of non-toxic glue to keep the cheese and toppings from flying off and I’m sure it’ll turn out fine.
I was thinking not of the main drive motor, but an old-style washing machine timer motor with a sub 1RPM rate. Don’t know how they’d fare in the heat of an oven, but they had plenty of torque — surely enough to rotate a pizza and stone.
If you like authentic pizza it’s usually a half brunt flatbed with a spritz of red something on it 3 globs of cheese and raw herbs on it so it should be fine
“a half brunt flatbed”
A slightly charred flat bread with beautiful leoparding on the bottom and a few blisters on the crust.
“a spritz of red something”
Delicious sweet San Marzano tomatoes, crushed.
“raw herbs”
*Fresh herbs
I have an Ooni (and Uuni 3) and my biggest challenge with it remains the stone being hot enough to properly brown the bottom of the pizza before the top has been cooked too much. I’m still working on it.
I got an Ooni Karu 12 and had this problem for some time.
For me the solution was to heat the stone to at least 420°C which is easier to achieve with the lid closed. When launching a pizza i turn back the gas burner about half the way. Pizza will take about 2mins. It would be better if it only took 60s-90s which can also be done but then the stone needs to be almost 460°C in my case and thats hard to achieve with gas in my case. Also you can try differnt Hydration levels of your dough. 60% is getting crispier a lot faster than 75%. Also the thickness matters a lot and its easier to stretch a low hydration dough than a high one since the gluten struckture is tougher ( can also be partially achieved with better flour though)
From The Last Samurai (with apologies)
You can spend your entire life searching for the perfect “one” and it would not be a wasted life.
.
In the end you realize they are all perfect.
So the hub of this spinning contraption just uses a handful of washers and some silicone grease – no bearing? How can this be reasonable stable? I though the round pressed part of the original metal part were for ball bearings.