Want to enjoy the wood-fired oven experience at home? Get an Ooni or a Roccbox. They’re compact, easy to use, and versatile enough to cook a whole load of dishes. As great as both of those are, though, you have to admit, they don’t look or feel all that professional. If you want to feel like you’re a five-star chef every time you get cooking in the backyard, you might want to elevate your outdoor cooking setup with the Gozney Dome instead.
Billed as a “professional-grade outdoor oven,” the backyard cooker brings wood-fired roasting, smoking, baking, and steaming in a professional package that boasts precision monitoring, airflow control, and exceptional heat retention. Basically, it does everything those compact wood-fired pizza ovens do, except with a lot more integrated elements that should help you whip up dishes even better.
The Gozney Dome is a wood-fired oven with a cooking chamber that measures 21.7 x 7.5 x 18.5 inches (width x height x depth), so you can use it to make 16-inch pizzas, roast large slabs of meat, and cook larger batches of food in one go. It uses kiln-dried kindling as its primary fuel, although it can also take charcoal, albeit the outfit only recommends it for low-and-slow cooking. Not enough kindling to get it to your desired cooking temperatures? Not a problem, as it supports dual-fuel cooking with an integrated gas burner (you can regulate it using the knob at the base), allowing you to supplement your meager stash of kindling with some propane from the tank any time you need it.
Depending on what you’re cooking, preheating can take as little as 10 minutes, although you’ll need to preheat around 45 minutes to get it ready for making pizzas and 55 minutes for full heat saturation. According to the outfit, it can heat up to maximum temperatures of 950 degrees Fahrenheit. To ensure you know exactly how hot the cooking chamber is, it comes with a digital thermometer that shows a digital reading at the base, along with a pair of meat probes for cooking steaks, chicken, and other meat dishes.
The Gozney Dome combines a 1.2-inch thick cordierite stone floor and dense cavity insulation, allowing it to stay hot for hours without any additional fuel. Specifically, it will take around five hours to drop from 750 degrees to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, so you can cook a whole host of stuff on this thing after burning just an initial batch of kindling. It comes with a sealed door for the cooking chamber that you can put on whenever you want to do some baking, along with a smoke stack on top, so all that smoke still has somewhere to go even when the chamber is all covered up.
Unlike most wood-fired ovens, this has an integrated steam injector that allows you to steam food inside the oven. Even better, the steaming function can be used during baking, allowing it to add moisture as needed for longer rising dough and crispier edges. They also have an optional cold smoke attachment that you can hook up to the accessory port at the base for making various types of smoked dishes.
The Gozney Dome is slated to come out in March of next year, priced at $1,299.