Choosing the best home pizza oven depends largely on what the specific user's definition of best is. Some users might consider the best pizza oven to be the one that makes pizza the quickest and easiest, while others prefer the pizza oven to cook a certain style of pizza, with a certain flavor, or within the confines of certain space requirements, such as on a countertop. Others may simply require a large oven that will allow the user to make several pizzas at once. Therefore, the first step in determining which pizza oven is best is to determine what the user's specific needs are.
Many countertop versions of the pizza oven exist. They are the less expensive of the many varieties of ovens, and can usually cook one or two pizzas at a time. They can range anywhere from $200 US Dollars (USD) to $800 USD and are usually powered by electricity, using heating elements within the oven to cook the pizza. Like other types of pizza ovens, these smaller, more compact countertop ovens usually have some sort of pizza stone inside, on which the pizza rests while cooking. A pizza stone is a round piece of ceramic or earthenware that helps evenly distribute heat throughout the dough to cook the pizza thoroughly.
More serious pizza connoisseurs might want to consider a brick oven. These types of pizza oven take up significantly more space than the countertop versions, and they are much more expensive and difficult to install. They must be built from stone or brick, and in most houses, space will be an issue because the ovens can be quite large. One way around this issue is to build the brick oven outside of the house, on a patio or in a back yard.
A brick oven is sometimes known as a wood-fired oven. The oven itself is made of stone or brick, and the bottom of the oven is made like a pizza stone — ceramic or earthenware. The open-faced oven is usually dome-shaped inside, and it is heated using a wood fire. The pizza is placed next to the fire, and the heat from the fire is distributed about the dome to evenly heat the pizza. Using a wood-fired oven can give the pizza a specific flavor depending on the type of wood used, how long the pizza is cooked, and how close to the fire it is cooked. Some wood-fired ovens come in kits that can be assembled at home, but they take time and patience to construct correctly.
