The first thing people tend to do when they get a pizza oven is invite you over for a pizza party, at which they will inevitably serve burned, yet undercooked pizza, and maybe even sacrifice a pie or two by dropping it in a failed attempt to turn it while in the oven. At CES 2025, Current Backyard has introduced a smart pizza oven that might solve for these problems.
The Current Model P Smart Pizza Oven is an electric pizza oven enabled with wifi and Bluetooth that can be used both indoors and outdoors. With help from an accompanying app, it promises to cook a perfect pie every time.
On its face, the concept is appealing: An oven that eliminates the most common pains of pizza-making by leveraging smart tech. The Model P uses an algorithm to cycle its heating, and so you never need to turn the pizza while it is in the oven, which is hard to do without a lot of practice. You don’t even need to open the door while the pizza is cooking.
The accompanying app has a “Pizza Build Calculator,” so regardless of what kind of pizza you want to make, it will tell you the exact amount of sauce, cheese, and toppings you need for, say, a 12-inch pizza in the style you choose (Neapolitan, New York, Thin Crust). Then, it will tell the oven how long and at what temperature to cook it—up to 850ªF.
You just have to get the pizza onto the cordierite cooking stone and then let the app and the oven handle it from there. Current claims that the oven doesn't need to reheat between pizzas, either—you can slide them in and out continuously, which is more like how a traditional wood pizza oven operates. Since a pizza oven is still just an oven, you can utilize the Model P for other cooking instances using the low or high broil function.
The oven looks sturdy enough, and is made of stainless steel. It comes with a 10-year limited warranty, and at $599, is priced on par for the market when compared to other electric ovens with the same temperature capacity. (While pricing for dedicated pizza ovens varies, they’re often not cheap—this smart model from Breville, for example, starts at around $800).
As someone with a few smart cooking devices, including the Brisk It Origin grill and the Brava Oven, both of which work the same way (let the app and device take over the cook time and temperature), I am a fan of the general concepts. I am a confident cook, but it's also nice to sometimes ease up and let a machine take over. The oven isn’t making the sauce or choosing the quality of toppings—you’re still ultimately in charge of the quality of the result—but the labor of standing over a stove and figuring out when something is done cooking is off the table, so to speak.
That said, I tested a Current smart backyard grill this past summer, and although it did precisely what it promised, I didn’t love the experience. Electric grills are great if you can’t use gas, charcoal, or wood for some reason, but you don’t get the same great smokiness or char you would from a “real” grill. I also found the Current to be a pain to clean. Without hands-on testing, it's hard to know if this pizza oven will offer similar setbacks.
As pizza ovens go, 850ªF isn’t actually all that hot—wood-fired pizza ovens can climb to over 1000ªF, and high heat is critical for creating the best crust. Still, it's not like you can bring a wood pizza oven inside your home, and electric pizza ovens are already quite popular, so adding smart tech to one of them is a potential win. We'll find out when it hits the market: The Model P should be available sometime in the second quarter of 2025.
