If you are here, you are probably concerned about investing in a pizza oven if its only function is cooking pizza. After all, no one wants to eat it every day regardless of how much you love these delicious, doughy pizzas.
It would make more sense to splurge on an appliance that offers more functions, an ultimate cooking accessory. The million-dollar question here is whether an outdoor pizza oven offers enough bang for the buck.
This outdoor appliance is the perfect cooking accessory for anyone looking to satisfy their craving, any day, any time. It offers you a wide range of cooking functions to support making several wood-fired dishes.
Without further ado, let’s address this question – What can you cook in an outdoor pizza oven?
Top Foods An Outdoor Pizza Oven Can Cook
A pizza oven, as its name implies, has similar cooking functions to your conventional indoor oven. So, if you want to experiment with your outdoor pizza oven, you should start with meals in your kitchen oven handles.
Here are ideas to explore on a pizza oven to help you do more than just make pizza and also get the best quality results out of the outdoor counterpart.
Pizza
Obviously, this scrumptious meal is where you want to start from. Homemade pizza supports almost any toppings to suit your taste and health. This ensures you get total control over their health.
Remember to keep the bases a bit thin with less cured meats and cheese for a healthy, family meal.
Cakes & Bread
With your outdoor pizza oven, you can bake cakes and bread like you would indoors. However, the outdoor wood-fired pizza oven offers a distinct rustic flavor to your bread.
Slow-Cooked and Roast Meat
Slow cook or roast a leg of lamb or a whole chicken for a sumptuous meal and add a sweet smokey flavor. Roasting a chicken in an outdoor pizza oven helps achieve a new level of flavor, making it a mainstay of most outdoor meals. With the wood-fired oven, you can use the smoke to your advantage for a deep rich flavor.
Roasted Vegetables
Place your chopped-up huge array of colorful vegetables in a pan drizzling with oil and seasoning. It’s a perfect cooking accessory for people who love roasted vegetables as a tasty side dish.
Baked Potatoes
Regardless of the variety of potatoes you’ve got, an outdoor pizza oven will leave the skin crispy and the inside fluffy and soft. This meal is best enjoyed when it’s topped with coleslaw, cheese, slow-cooked meat, tuna, and a bean mix.
Seafood
When it comes to simple yet tasty dishes; seafood is your go-to. You can wrap the fish in a parcel with chili, and lemon wedges and bake until it’s perfectly cooked. It’s safe to experiment with any kind of fish that cooks perfectly on a plank of cedar or maple. These woods are safe and ideal for this sole purpose.
Desserts
Remember, an outdoor pizza oven can be used like your conventional kitchen oven, which means you can try a dessert pizza or apple crumble. The base should be well-cooked and topped with fruit, mascarpone, or chocolate spread.
By now, you must be eager to try one of these foods on your outdoor pizza. The outdoor pizza oven will support cooking a wide range of dishes and ensure you have fun in your new cooking adventure.
Benefits of Pizza Oven
Wood-fired ovens offer incredible ways to ensure healthy, family meals without having to break the bank to enjoy healthy meals. Another benefit of owning a wood-fired oven is its environmentally friendly, which runs on wood and helps maintain a much greener lifestyle.
You don’t need electricity with an outdoor oven but wood and fire to get the oven started. It’s also important to use the best wood for the best flavors and ensure your pizza oven stays healthy.
Types of Outdoor Pizza Ovens
When it comes to pizza ovens, gas or wood-fired models are the most common options. Both models have their strengths and weaknesses that might work best for you.
Wood Pizza Ovens
Wood pizza ovens offer an authentic wood-fired flavor that leaves anyone begging for more. However, you should expect a bit of a learning curve in building a fire, and cleaning out after cooking can be a bit challenging.
This model is built with bricks, making them a treat to the eye and making your backyard a nice place to have your family reunion. Unfortunately, building this oven can be very expensive, except if you love DIY projects.
More so, it takes at least an hour to attain your preferred temperature and can be slightly trickier to maintain. But with metal options, you get quicker heat-up time than brick models and relatively cheaper than gas counterparts since there are no burner elements.
Further, wood-fired ovens are heavy and large, which means it takes up a lot of space. Plus, it isn’t safe to use during fire restriction time.
Gas Pizza Ovens
Gas pizza ovens feature a knob to make using them a lot easier. Unlike brick ovens, they heat up quickly and are a lot easier to control and maintain the temperature throughout your cooking period.
Also, cleaning this model is a breeze since you don’t have to clean up the ash or prepare for the fire. Some models come with a light and a viewing window similar to your conventional kitchen oven.
Even better, a gas pizza oven with a wood chip smoker box allows you to impart your food with that mouth-watering wood-fired flavor.
Can You Smoke Meat in An Outdoor Pizza Oven?
The popularity of the pizza oven has been steadily climbing for decades, but what about smoking meat? This is a question that many outdoor chefs have been asking themselves. Smoke from the fire gives food a distinctive flavor that can’t be matched by an oven or grill alone. However, it does require a lot of extra work and time to start a fire, let it burn down to coals, and then maintain the temperature at 220-250 degrees Fahrenheit.
What Is The Best Pizza to Cook in an Outdoor Pizza Oven?
There are many delicious pizza recipes that can be made in an outdoor pizza oven. One popular recipe is a simple Margherita pizza, which consists of tomato sauce, mozzarella, parmesan, and basil. Other preparations include various types of pasta dishes using lasagna or spaghetti noodles.
Wrap It Up
Outdoor pizza ovens bring fun to your typical backyard family reunion or other celebrations with friends and family. They function similarly to your indoor kitchen oven, but a little better by infusing your recipes with incomparable flavor to make your mouth water. Besides, cooking with this large, heavy oven makes you feel like a chef and cooks delicious and savory dishes with awful wood-fired cooking skills.