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Ooni's rotating pizza stone can help you leave burnt pies in the past. Pamela Vachon/CNET
There's a moment every home pizza maker knows: the raw pie is on the peel, the oven is blisteringly hot and it feels like everything could go south in seconds. Getting it in cleanly is one thing. Spinning it around inside 900 degrees F so it cooks evenly is another problem entirely.
Ooni, a leader in the at-home pizza category, has released a rotating stone to help both amateur and experienced at-home pizza makers just in time for summer. I tried it to see whether it offers a notable improvement to my at-home pizza oven routine. Here's everything you need to know about the new Ooni rotating stone and why I'm hooked on the upgrade.
Why rotate? Understanding how a pizza oven works
Not having to manually rotate your pie in a 700-degree oven is a good thing. Pamela Vachon/CNET
If you were to compare pizzas made in a traditional pizza oven and one with a revolving pizza stone side by side, you might not notice much of a difference at first -- assuming, of course, you followed the instructions correctly. With traditional pizza ovens, even though the high internal temperatures can cook a pizza in just one or two minutes (depending on how thin you stretched the crust), you're still expected to reach in with the pizza peel and manually rotate the pie every 20 seconds or so. Even then, inconsistencies can happen.
Rotating a pie by hand requires your full attention. Even so, the results can be uneven.
This is necessary because of the way a typical pizza oven works. To appreciate the effectiveness of Ooni's new rotating pizza stone, it's important to understand your pizza oven's atmosphere. Essentially, while heat radiates upward from the preheated pizza stone at the base of the model, convection and radiation are also at work, circulating the superheated air in a vacuum tornado. While this is incredibly effective at cooking pizza in just a minute or two, it also creates hotter and cooler zones inside the oven. That means even a 20-second delay in rotating the pie can leave you with blackened, blistered spots on one side and slightly puffy, undercooked dough on another.
What a rotating pizza stone does for the pizza-making process
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