There's nothing like a good pizza oven for feeding a crowd. These increasingly popular appliances are perfect for making party food.
However, pizza ovens aren't always ready to use out of the box. A handful of essential accessories make the whole experience a lot less stressful.
Years of testing the best pizza ovens have shown me that these products are all essentials for making the very best pizza. From a simple cleaning brush to a high-tech digital thermometer, these are the crucial tools every pizzaiolo should have on hand.
Essential pizza oven accessories
Years of testing have taught me that a pizza peel is the most important tool for a pizza oven. It's the tool you use to load the pizza onto the stone. Not every pizza oven brand includes pizza peels as standard - Ooni is notorious for this, and it's one of the most common complaints about the brand. This means that many people can't use their ovens out of the box, because they can't actually load the pizza into the oven. When I've tested overs without peels in test kitchens I've sometimes had to approximate a pizza peel with a baking tray, which can be tricky. This affordable peel has a foldable handle, so it's easy to store.
Not every grill comes with a thermometer included, and some of those which do have thermometers aren't reliable. This makes for poor pizza. A digital thermometer gun like this from Ooni will help you heat your pizza oven to a precise degree, and has useful color coding to tell you when the oven is ready to go.
Mezzaluna (half-moon in Italian) knives are lifesavers when you're cooking a lot of pizza at once. One of the drawbacks of most pizza ovens (with the notable exceptions of the Ooni Koda Max 2 and Alfa's large ovens) is that you can only cook one pizza at a time, so you have to be efficient at getting pizzas to the table so that everyone can eat at once. A knife like this is much faster than a pizza wheel cutter because it cuts across the entirety of a pizza in one motion.
It can be awkward to cook with a domestic pizza oven because it needs a surface to stand on. This can be a little inconvenient and usually means giving up a sizeable portion of your outdoor table. Instead, a grill table cart like this offers you a work surface without having to give up any real estate on your outdoor furniture. Best of all, it comes with lots of handy features. It has a bottle opener, hooks for storing tools, and stainless steel pans for holding toppings for your pies.
A turning peel is vital for getting the best possible bake. It's a slightly different tool from the usual pizza peel because it has a much smaller surface area. This means that you can use it to shuffle the pizza around as it bakes. This is especially crucial in wood-fired pizza ovens because the edge closest to the fire will burn if you don't turn it regularly. This inexpensive pizza peel has a detachable extra-long handle, so you can choose to get in close to the action as you maneuver your pizza or manipulate it from a safer distance.
Pizza ovens are tricky appliances to clean. You should never get the pizza stone wet, so you're limited to brushing the pizza stone to remove the worst of the soot and baked-on toppings. This extra long pizza brush from Ooni will let you reach right to the back of the oven, and it has a metal scraper end to tackle tough, burnt remnants of cheese and sauce.
If you don't know what you're doing, pizza ovens are notoriously hard to clean. A dirty oven makes for bad pizza. Learning how to clean a pizza oven is a quick way to elevate your pizza skills.
