Easy to use and armed with incredible cooking power, Blackstone’s pizza oven has plenty to love. Find out everything you need to know with our review.
Note: Unfortunately it appears that the Blackstone pizza oven has been discontinued. Take a look out our guide to the other best pizza ovens currently available online.
Outdoor pizza oven are growing in popularity. While there are more expensive traditional wood fired models available, there are now more affordable option that still give you that beautiful taste of a real pizza oven.
The Blackstone is one such model.
Blackstone have long remained one of the best brands out there for producing outdoor cooking equipment, particularly outdoor BBQ grills, and this pizza oven is no different.
Unboxing the Blackstone Pizza Oven
So what do you get with the Blackstone? Do you get a lot of bang for your buck, or are you left scrambling for parts to get the oven off the ground?
The good news is that the oven comes packed with a lot of added extras. Fresh out the box you get:
- 2x 16-inch pizza cooking stones
- Rotating pizza tray
- Side shelves
- Wire rack
- Built-in hood thermometer
Blackstone have thrown in an electric ignition system. Faithful gas grill or combo grill users might be familiar with these, as an easy way to get your grill started with just a push of the button. This feature is shamefully lacking in a lot of modern pizza ovens, so it’s fantastic to see Blackstone have the ingenuity to adapt it for their oven.
The motor for the ignition system is powered by a couple of “D” batteries, but it can easily be plugged in as well.
Weighing around 105 pounds, it’s heavy duty enough to be fantastic at insulating, but so heavy that it’s an immovable beast. It’s easy enough to move around your patio or garden should you need to.
With any form of oven based cooking, maintaining consistent cooking temperatures across the surface of the cooking area. This is true for smokers, and for grills, and it’s certainly true for pizza ovens. The Blackstone does a great job of this, ensuring that your pizza’s dough is cooked through while also retaining that iconic crust to it around its edges.
Its cooking capacity allows you to cook pizzas up to 16 inches in diameter. If you’re unfamiliar with pizza sizes… This is big. Considering the price of this oven, this is a generous amount of state to be offered by Blackstone.
Despite its size, it doesn’t take an age for your pizza to be cooked. Given that it’s not wood fuelled means that its startup time is practically instant compared to more traditional methods. Even with wood fired ovens, pizzas are famous for not taking long to cook. In this oven, it can be done in just 90 to 120 seconds. This is remarkable, and means that you can get a conveyor belt of pizzas going to feed a party of guests.
The key to this is its 60,000 of BTUs that it offers up. As people who are familiar with gas grills will tesity, this is a lot of power. What this means for you is that your oven can achieve an impressive level of heat within a short period of time, making the cooking time for your pizza short and swift without compromising on quality or consistency.
While traditional wood fired pizza ovens require wood for fuel, Blackstone’s outdoor pizza oven doesn’t rely on it. Wood can be a difficult beast to master, as a knowledge of knowing how the flavors can match with your food is often required. If you get it wrong, you can mess up your food completely.
Thankfully, Blackstone have done away with that, giving it a much more regular oven setup. It’s uses a reflected heat system that manages to emulate the best of wood has to offer.
One of its best features is its motor-powered rotating tray. It’s so effective that now that we’ve tried it, we couldn’t go back to a static tray. In fact, it even has a hypnotic quality to it. This feature isn’t just a gimmick however. The rotating acts almost like the a rotisserie does, in that it helps guarantee that your pizza is cooked evenly, without any cold spots or gooey soft areas.
It’s big enough to hold a 20lb bottle of propane, meaning that if you get the right tank then you can squeeze a lot out of the oven before your fuel starts to run out.
With any bit of outdoor cooking equipment, durability is always a key concern of ours. Features and performance are no good if the whole thing collapses on itself after only a few uses.
Fortunately, Blackstone’s oven is just what you’d want. It’s features a stainless steel front plate, and its internal materials are well made for excellent heat distribution and retention.
How to Use the Blackstone Pizza Oven
Check the pizza tray motor. With it being a key feature, it’s important to make sure the motor is functional before applying any heat in the oven. If the motor isn’t working then you will need to check the D batteries are working, or that the oven is plugged in (duh).
Get your own thermometer. As convenient as it might seem for there to be an included thermometer, these tend to be cheap and reliable. Accurate temperature reading is imperative with cooking, so I always recommend getting your own. This is true for BBQ grills, and also for pizza ovens.
If you’re unsure of what to get, check out my guide to grill surface thermometers here.
Protect it from the elements. Weather in the form of rain or wind can play havoc with the temperature stability of your cooking environment. You can combat this is two ways: One is to shield your oven behind a wall. Another is to invest in a cover.
Don’t overdo the toppings. A thin base is key to a good evenly cooked pizza, but also key to this is not going overboard with the number of toppings you put on the base. If you overload it then the toppings won’t allow the base to cook properly, and might even leave it soggy and difficult to slide off the pizza stone.
Wipe the pizza stone after each use. It’s easy for burned on food to build up as you use the pizza stone, so be sure to give it a quick wipe down after each use.
