VonHaus Outdoor Wood Pellet Pizza Oven Review – this article first appeared on our family blog, Yorkshire Wonders.
I have been hankering after a pizza oven for a long time now, so jumped, nay leapt at the opportunity to try out this Pizza Oven from VonHaus!
Firstly, I am amazed at the price point these are now available at, and was a smidge sceptical it might be a bit sub par. I needn’t have worried on that score. It arrived promptly with a smidge of minor assembly required. Not a lot, just attaching a few bits that could have been battered in transit. They quote about 10 minutes and that’s pretty much what it took. Just a few small screws to attach a handle and the pellet hopper, the legs are already in place.
Once assembled and a suitable place found we engaged our expert skills in pizza making 🙂 We filled the wood pellet tray with wood pellets, added a wood wool firelighter (the instructions also mention you can use a blowtorch) and left it.
10-15minutes later it was burning beautifully with a lovely rolling flame on the inside. This promptly went out, we had burnt all the pellets it seemed so added more, within a few minutes we were going again. This process did occur more than once, we learnt for the following day that once lit, you can top up the pellet hopper on the top with pellets (using the provided scoop) and it cleverly feeds them down to the burny part and keeps going for plenty time to cook pizza! If cooking more, just keep half an eye on the pellets in the hopper and top them up as required.
We have made a lot of pizzas over the years, but always in our home oven. We use a liberal sprinkling of semolina flour under the base to stop it sticking. Launch it into the pizza oven when up to temperature and within 2 minutes, perfect pizza emerges. About halfway through, pop it out and spin 180 degrees for even cooking.
I honestly thought we would have numerous disasters in the form of burnt and stuck pizzas, but no, it feels easy so far and produces a premium product.
One thing to note, buy a pizza peel – the large metal spatula you ‘launch’ the pizza in with – and some wood pellets before it arrives. Also, cheat, and buy some ready rolled pizza dough, whilst we love to make our own dough too, we found it great and so quick to get started with. We also tried some pre-made supermarket pizza bases in the pizza oven, they were dreadful in comparison and no cheaper, buy the dough and eat good pizza!
The first time we used it, lets call it a learning process……..we still ate nice pizza, but the next days pizza were way better! All in all, it is very well made, rather fun and makes delicious pizza, we are very pleased with it and will be eating a lot of pizza this year.
We were sent this pizza oven for a review. As always, all opinions expressed are my own.