Easy to use and packed with incredible cooking performance, the Blackstone Pizza Oven has a lot to love. Find out everything you need to know with our review.
Note: Unfortunately, the Blackstone Pizza Oven appears to have been discontinued. Take a look at our guide to the other best pizza ovens currently available online.
The outdoor pizza oven is enjoying growing popularity. While there are traditional wood-fired models that are more expensive, there are now more visible options that still give you the nice taste of a real pizza oven.
The Blackstone is one of those models.
Blackstone has long been one of the top brands in the manufacture of outdoor cooking equipment, particularly outdoor barbecue grills, and this pizza oven is no different.
Unpacking the Blackstone Pizza Oven
So, what did you get with the Blackstone? Do you get great bang for your buck or do you have to fight for the parts to get the furnace running?
The good news is that the oven comes with many additional extras. Right out of the box you get:
- 2 x 16 inch pizza cooking stones
- Pizza turntable
- Side gift
- Wire rack
- Built-in bell thermometer
Blackstone installed an electronic ignition system. Faithful users of gas grills or combi grills will fall in love with these as they are an easy way to get your grill going with the push of a button. Embarrassingly, this feature is absent from many modern pizza ovens, so it’s great to see Blackstone have had the ingenuity to incorporate it into their oven.
The ignition system motor is powered by a pair of “D” batteries, but can also be simply plugged in.
Weighing around 105 pounds, it’s sturdy enough to be awesome as an absorbent, but heavy enough to be an immobile beast. It’s easy enough to move around your yard or garden when needed.
With any form of oven-based cooking, constant cooking temperatures over the entire cooking surface. This applies to smokers and grills and certainly also to pizza ovens. The Blackstone does a great job of doing this, ensuring your pizza crust is cooked through while retaining that iconic crust around the edges.
With its cooking capacity, you can cook pizzas up to 16 inches in diameter. If you’re not equipped with the pizza sizes… That’s great. Considering the price of this stove, that’s a generous amount of status that Blackstone offers.
Despite its size, it doesn’t take long for your pizza to be ready. Because it is not wood fired, its start time is virtually instantaneous compared to traditional methods. Even with wood-fired ovens, pizzas are known for not taking long to cook. In this oven, this is done in just 90 to 120 seconds. That’s respected and means YOU can get a pizza conveyor to feed a bunch of guests.
The key to this is the 60,000 BTUs it offers. As gas grill connoisseurs know, that’s a lot of power. What this means for you is that your oven can reach impressive heat in a short amount of time, making your pizza baking time short and fast without sacrificing quality or texture.
While traditional wood-fired pizza ovens require wood for fuel, the Blackstone outdoor pizza oven does not. Wood can be a difficult beast to master, often requiring knowledge of how to pair flavors with your food. If you mess up, you can completely ruin your meal.
Thanks, Blackstone removed that and switched to a much more normal oven configuration. It uses a reflected heat system that manages to mimic the best that wood has to offer.
One of its best features is the motorized turntable. It’s so effective that now that we’ve tried it, we won’t go back to a static tablet. In fact, it even has a hypnotic quality. However, this feature is not just a gimmick. The rotation works similar to a rotisserie spit, helping your pizza cook evenly with no cold spots or soft, sticky areas.
It’s big enough to hold a 20-pound propane bottle, which means that with the right tank, YOU can squeeze plenty out of the stove before running out of fuel.
With all outdoor kitchen appliances, durability is always a key concern for us. Features and performance aren’t great when everything falls apart after a few uses.
Luckily, the Blackstone Furnace is exactly what you want. It is a stainless steel faceplate and its internals are well finished to ensure heat distribution and retention.
How to use the Blackstone Pizza Oven
Check pizza pan motor. As this is a key feature, it is important to ensure the engine is running before applying heat to the stove. If the motor doesn’t work, you need to check if the D batteries are working or the stove is plugged in(duh).
Get your own medical thermometer. As handy as it may seem to have a thermometer included, these tend to be cheap and reliable. Accurate temperature reading is a must when cooking, so I always recommend getting your own. This also applies to grills and pizza ovens.
If you’re not sure what to buy, check out my guide to surface grill thermometers here .
Protect is from the elements. Weather in the form of rain or wind can affect the temperature stability of your kitchen environment. You can counteract this in two ways: First, shield your stove behind a wall. Another is to invest in a cover.
Don’t overdo it with the ingredients. A thin crust is key to a good, evenly cooked pizza, but it’s also important not to overdo it with the amount of toppings YOU put on the crust. If you overload the toppings, the crust may not cook properly and could even become muscular and difficult to slide off the pizza stone.
Clean the pizza stone after each use. Burnt food can easily accumulate while using the pizza stone, so be sure to clean it quickly after each use.
Writer & content creator. BBQ fanatic!
