Now that I no longer live in New York, I’ve been trying to fill the hole in my heart that NYC pizza left. The answer, it turned out, was even better pizza. I’ve been fortunate enough to try out a few pizza ovens in my time. The Ooni was great, and The Gozney Roccbox was even better. But recently, one pizza oven just put these two to shame. Gozney’s new Dome is a wood-firing masterpiece, one that anyone who is or wants to be serious about pizza should proudly have in their backyard.
What makes the Dome special is not the fact that it can be both a wood-fired or propane-powered oven—although don’t get me wrong, that is fantastic. Instead, it's the fact that it can do this (and more) and be extremely easy to use at the same time. For example, I thought building a fire that was strong enough to reach 900F was beyond my paygrade—but with the pre-included wood and instructions, it took me 15 minutes to achieve this temperature. The temperature itself doesn’t require an infrared thermometer, but instead, is built into a gauge on the side of the oven. The cool part about this is it also comes with thermometer probes so if you’re cooking steak (yes you can cook steak), you can just plug them into the thermometer, and easily measure their internal heat. It’s like one of those WiFi or Bluetooth grills, only better. It doesn’t require WiFi, a phone, anything. Just wood and delicious ingredients. It makes how cooking outside should be: simple.
The Dome can do just about anything. It can make Neapolitan Pizzas with the slightest taste of mesquite. It can grill a beautiful steak, and achieve a barbeque-like crust on top, while keeping it perfectly rare inside (remember those thermometer probes?). It can slow cook pulled pork, it can bake sourdough bread, it can sear Alaskan salmon, it can grill farm-raised vegetables, and oh yeah, it can be the talking point of an entire party. Its design, which is easy to overlook because of everything it can do, is incredible—it looks like an actual brick-built wood-fired oven, the one that if you’re still reading this, you probably dreamed about always having.
