If we’re being honest, we feel like it should be unnecessary to give you seven reasons why you need your own outdoor pizza oven. It’s like writing an article entitled, “7 Reasons Why You Should Breathe Oxygen”. Of course you need oxygen…and an outdoor pizza oven, where you can cook pizza! Outside! In a real pizza oven!

But we understand that maybe one in every hundred people might not get how incredible it is to be able to prepare perfectly-fired, homemade pizza in your own backyard. So for the benefit of those people we wanted to share seven full reasons why you should get your own outdoor pizza oven a soon as possible.

1. You Just Plain Love Pizza — Only an Outdoor Pizza Oven Will Do

There is almost nothing like a fresh pizza, made from perfect, homemade dough, slathered in marinara, piled high with premium cheese, veggies and meats and then fired to bubbly, crusty perfection, with just the right amount of char and smokiness from the wood fire. Store bought frozen pizza doesn’t cut it. Microwave pizza DEFINITELY doesn’t compare. Making a quality pizza in your indoor oven isn’t quite the same either.

Restaurant-quality pizza requires very high temperatures to get the crust baked just right. These are temperatures outdoor pizza ovens have no problem achieving. Most indoor consumer stoves max out at 450F and great pizza requires at least 500F. Ingenuitive pizza chefs have come up with some clever workarounds to get decent results at lower temperatures, but nothing really compares to having a stove capable of generating the heat required to properly bake a pizza.

You love pizza. We’ve already established that. So if you’re interested in making high quality homemade pizza, shouldn’t you give yourself the proper tools for the job? Don’t be satisfied hacking your indoor stove with empty baking sheets to reflect heat back at your pizza. Get yourself a wood-fired outdoor pizza oven. Your homemade pizzas will never be the same again.

2. You Want to Cook Pizza Fast

The above header has a double meaning. Yes, you want to cook your pizza fast. Of course you do. The quicker you can get it fired the quicker you can stuff your face, and that’s always a noble pursuit.

But also, you want to cook pizza fast. That’s the proper way to bake it. You want high temperatures and short bake times. At 515F your pizza shouldn’t be in the oven longer than five to six minutes. Yes, it really should bake that fast. And if you’re baking with a wood fired pizza oven, like the Uuni Pro Portable Wood Fired Outdoor Pizza Oven you could work somewhere around 700F.

Most restaurants fire their pizzas in the 700 to 800F range. You need these high temperatures to get the proper crispness on the outside while maintaining chewiness on the inside, plus only a very hot oven can produce a nice bit of char. And temperatures that high require very short cook times. Otherwise your pizza would be a more effective frisbee than dinner.

So yes, you want to cook pizza fast, for all the best reasons, and an outdoor pizza oven is the only way for the home pizza enthusiast to bake restaurant-quality pies.

3. You Get a Better Tasting Pizza

Certainly some of the extra flavor results from your impeccable culinary skills, but most of it comes from how your pizza is cooked.

When a pizza is cooked at a very high temperature the crust bakes rapidly, gaining a nice, consistent crispness all over. However, because of the short bake time, the high heat doesn’t have the opportunity to dry out the entire crust, so you end up with a crispy outside, and a nice, pliable, delicately chewy interior. You get the perfect pizza crust.

The cheese benefits, too. The lower temperatures found in standard indoor ovens aren’t always perfectly uniform. This means there’s a good chance your cheese won’t melt entirely, and in the end you may have perfectly-melted sections right next to pieces where the cheese is still only partially melted. That’s an untenable situation if your goal is the perfect slice.

Hot outdoor pizza ovens, like the CBO-750 Countertop Pizza Oven by Chicago Brick Oven, bring the cheese to its melting point rapidly, ensuring not only a perfect, even melt, but also a bit of caramelization on the outdoor surface, leading to extra layers of flavor.

Caramelization is also a flavor enhancer for your sauce and toppings. You don’t just want your pizza toppings cooked and hot. You get that with a frozen pizza. You want them to be pummeled with heat so that they char slightly and shrivel, allowing some of their natural sugars to blossom in flavor. You need the high heat an outdoor pizza oven can produce to realize the complex flavors all of your pizza components a capable of.

Plus the wood smoke adds a flavor that no other oven can match. Period.

4. Outdoor Pizza Ovens Save Electricity

Or gas, whichever stove type you happen to have. Did you know that cooking a pizza at 450 degrees in a standard indoor oven uses 350 kilojoules of electricity?
Well, it doesn’t. We’re pretty sure kilojoules doesn’t measure electricity use and we have no idea how much electricity you use when cooking a pizza. But it sounded impressive, right? Just hold onto that feeling while you read the rest of this section.

When you’re baking your pizza in an outdoor pizza oven you’re burning wood, the same wood you’d load into your fireplace on a cold winter’s night. Depending on where you live this firewood could be very inexpensive or free, particularly if you collect it yourself from downed trees around your home. Instead of having to run your indoor stove at high temperatures, using a lot of electricity or gas you can cook your pizza for free, and get far better results.

5. You Can Cook More Than Just Pizza in an Outdoor Pizza Oven
It’s true! An outdoor, wood-fired pizza oven is just an oven that’s capable of high heat and gives things cooked in it an unmistakable smoky complexity hard to achieve in other ovens. It’s really worth trying most recipes in your pizza oven in order to see what it can do.

Certainly other pizza-like dishes, like calzones and crusty breads can be baked in a pizza oven. But so can meats. Imagine cooking a steak on a grilled laid on top of the stone surface of your pizza oven. The high heat will cook our steak perfectly, impart a wonderful crust to the surface, and give you the juiciest, best tasting final product you’ve ever eaten.

If you have a mobile outdoor pizza oven like the CBO-750 Mobile Pizza Oven, you can move your oven around your yard, making it more convenient for everyday use. If it’s raining you can move it somewhere covered. You don’t need to let the weather dictate how frequently you can use your pizza oven.

You can cook fire-roasted vegetables, Italian pasta favorites, casseroles in stoneware, and seafood. Desserts, shish kabobs, soups, and even whole turkeys. Anything you put in your wood-fired pizza oven will come out more flavorful than you’ve ever experienced at home. Remember that the wood you chose bears on the flavor you’ll get from your food, so feel free to experiment!

6. You Could Become the King of the Cul-De-Sac

Get yourself a proper outdoor pizza oven and you’ll find your parties become destinations for your neighbors. Who wouldn’t want to attend a cookout that included homemade, wood-fired pizzas? The only person we can think of is our Uncle Albert, but he hates absolutely everything, including kittens. Who hates kittens?!

Imagine if you bought one of our excellent pizza oven kits, the basic guts of a pizza oven, intended to be placed inside a custom built oven facade, like the CBO-500 DIY Outdoor Pizza Oven Kit. You could integrate your pizza oven directly into the aesthetic of your outdoor dining space. Your backyard grilling / pizza oven area would catch your neighbors’ eyes and hold tight. Your backyard would be THE place to go on a Friday night for your entire neighborhood. And your family gatherings? They would be epic.

7. You Can Build Your Culinary Skills

Cooking the proper pizza is as much science as art. It takes the just right interplay of ingredients, preparation, heat and time. If you want to elevate your pizza game, you have to bake in a wood-fired, outdoor pizza oven. You simply can’t get the results you’re looking for any other way.

And because your pizza oven can cook so much more than just pizza, it’s ripe for experimentation. Using your pizza oven, you could take your entire culinary skill set to the next level. There will be new techniques to learn. New ways of utilizing direct and indirect heat to improve nearly every dish you currently prepare. It’s true that the only way to get better at anything is to push yourself, and adding a whole new oven experience into your repertoire will build your culinary skills faster than anything else.

Get Your Outdoor Pizza Oven Today

I know. We had you at number one. But we’re glad you stuck it through to the end, if for no other reason than we put a good bit of work into this article and we’d hate for it to never be read. But it’s over so go take a look at our selection of outdoor pizza ovens and choose the one that’s right for you! All the wonderful pizzas you’ll produce in the future are excited to be born. Don’t make them wait any longer. It’s not fair to them and it’s definitely not fair to you. Enjoy!