Sage Pizzaiolo
Outdoor pizza ovens are great, but Britain is cold and wet… so Sage has designed an indoor cooker that promises stone-baked sizzlers in two minutes
All our Giuseppes are sloppy
£700 / stuff.tv/pizzaiolo
You can argue over crust thickness, fruit-based toppings and the merits of semolina flour all you want, but the fact is, pizza is great. Making your own can be fun too, so it’s little wonder Google searches for ‘pizza ovens’ have quadrupled in the last year.
But not everyone wants to go outside to stone-bake flatbread every time they hear the call of the wild (rocket); so while the likes of Ooni and Gozney make awesome al-fresco cookers (see panel opposite), what we really want is to make a passable ‘real’ pizza in the kitchen.
Enter the Sage Smart Oven Pizzaiolo, a powerful indoor pizza oven promising restaurant-quality thin and crispy, wood-fired-style and even deep-pan deliciousness without any danger of burning the house down.
It’s a serious-looking device, with robust controls and a solid double-glazed door. But it’s the taste that really matters – time to get a slice of the action.
Uptown grill
Sage’s stainless steel cooker comes with a traditional pizza stone and a clever non-stick deep-pan dish with a removable handle. There’s also a nicely designed all-metal pizza peel. It’s a great-looking appliance with retro vibes that can be kept at hand on a kitchen worktop (1).
And so it glows
Capable of 400°C, it delivers wood-fired heat minus the wood in under two minutes. That’s terrifyingly hot. A combination of conductive, convective and radiant tech crisps bases and bubbles mozzarella, with a top halo ring producing the classic leopard-spotted crust (2).
New York state of rind
Not all pizzas need searing temperatures, so things can be adjusted to cook deep-pan, New York-style, thin and crispy, wood-fired, and even frozen (3). A clever magnetic chart fits over the controls to help guide your style, including how dark you’d like your base.
Steams from an Italian restaurant The oven heats up in 20 minutes, but baking a margarita really does take under two minutes (4). Our base was evenly cooked, the cheese properly melted… and the kitchen smelt heavenly. Sliding the pizza out is easy and it only takes a couple of minutes to heat up again for round two.
Mozzarella about it
Controlling cooking at 400°C still requires skill – dough thickness, choice of cheese and toppings are all factors to juggle. Switching to thin and crispy meant longer cooking times (5), but the pizzas were consistent. Deep-pan took 18 minutes… with deliciously indulgent results.
If you’re serious about pizza, the Smart Oven Pizzaiolo is a giver of dreams. It’s stylish, easy to use and impressively consistent. The various settings really do work, and being able to tweak them to your taste means you’re unlikely to grow out of using it – a problem with so many kitchen gadgets. @chrishaslam