We’re big fans of the current crop of backyard pizza ovens, which allow you to crank out one pie after another in short succession once the oven is properly preheated. While they’re great when making pizza for the family, it’s a little tougher to use when hosting a pizza party with more than a few people, since the two-minute wait between each pie adds up to a lot when you need to make a dozen or so pieces for a hungry group with nothing to munch on. For that situation, you probably need a bigger pizza oven. That’s exactly what the Ooni Koda 2 Max brings to the backyard.
Instead of having to cook one Neapolitan-style pizza at a time, the new oven is big enough to let you crank out two of them in one go, allowing you to halve the normal wait times, making it a much more viable option for parties. Want to make bigger pizzas? It can do that, too, with a cooking area that can accommodate large 20-inch pies that your guests can share (after you slice them up, of course).
The Ooni Koda 2 Max is, basically, a bigger version of the outfit’s pizza ovens, with a large 24-inch diameter cordierite cooking surface that can accommodate a single 20-inch pizza, two 12-inch pizzas, or three 10-inch pizzas at a time. The cooking surface isn’t just wider, it’s thicker, too, measuring 20 mm in thickness, so it should hold heat for much longer to ensure more efficient cooking times, regardless of whether you’re cranking out pizzas, kebabs, or some other delicious grub.
To properly heat the more spacious cooking chamber, it’s equipped with independently-controlled gas burners on each side. Not only does this allow for faster, more efficient heating, it also lets you control the temperature on each side of the cooking chamber separately. This makes it possible to set up two separate cooking zones, so you can adequately sear salmon on one side while cooking pizza on the other. Sadly, there’s no option for wood-fired cooking.
The Ooni Koda 2 Max uses a gas burner that produces a tapered flame, which, the outfit claims, allows it to generate more even heat across the oven for more consistent temperatures, as well as a digital readout in the lower front that you can use to check the temperature for either side of the cooking area. It can even wirelessly transmit the temperature data to a companion phone app, so you can be alerted as soon as the oven has preheated to the desired temperatures, eliminating the need to constantly check on the oven.
As with some of their previous pizza ovens, this one has foldable legs that make it more compact, making it easier to slide in the boot of your car for taking the oven to picnics, tailgates, and other places. From the looks of it, you’ll have to remove the temperature readout when folding, so it should be detachable from its bottom-mounted perch.
The Ooni Koda 2 Max comes out May 28th, priced at $999.