Pizza-Porta vs Portable Propane ovens

I am often asked to compare portable tabletop pizza ovens (Ooni, Rockbox and others) to the Pizza-Porta. They are obviously popular, but what they do is different from what Pizza-Porta was developed to achieve.

I set out to make great pizza in the backyard. The benchmark was twofold: The delicious pizza that was coming out of a friend’s wood-fired Forno Bravo pizza oven, and the ease with which he cooked one after another at a party. The criteria for a solution became:

1) Make really great pizza

2) Support a party (easily cook at least 5-6 pizzas in a row for a party),

3) Robust, predictable, straightforward cooking (its a party, nobody wants to be chained to the grill, or the only one who can operate it),

4) Authenticity to the craft of pizza (able to adapt to different styles of pizza, conventional dough handling, and the taste of wood-fired crust)

I looked at a propane-powered grill with a built-in electric rotisserie. It was really loud and sounded and smelled like cooking pizza with a propane blowtorch. There was an electric oven that would reach really high temperatures, but it had all the tradition and authenticity of cooking pizza in a toaster oven. I also considered a pellet-powered portable tabletop oven, but the pellets were fiddley to keep fed and the oven would only really work consistently with a propane tank. (I was back to propane torch pizza.) I also realized that portability was not that valuable because I would be cooking in my backyard.

At the time, my Egg was not producing great pizza, but it seemed to have the most potential. A Big Green Egg or Kamado Joe is a heavy-duty, stable, wood-fired heat source that is designed to handle the high temperatures of pizza grilling. There is mass to hold temperatures steady, there is a dome, and the grill is big enough for an evening load of fuel. If there were only a way to harness that cooking potential! Propping the lid open with a pizza wedge or leaving an open window just didn’t do the trick. After some trial and error and some physics review, the Pizza-Porta reconfigures the cooking chamber.

When you are able to trap all of the heat, retain temperature control, and keep heat from escaping each time you check a pizza you have a real-deal wood-fired pizza oven. The Pizza-Porta turns out to be a robust cooking device for making one pizza or fifty. The operation is predictable across a variety of temperature settings and the pizza has that authentic wood-fired quality.

You can read more about the development process HERE