Scientists find proof that an asteroid hit the North Sea more than 43 million years ago.
To the folks at Ooni who say the stone base inside their Koda Pro 2 pizza oven will only rarely need light cleaning, I have only one thing to say.
You have never seen someone in a panic, madly trying to shake a rhomboid-shaped pizza from a pizza peel, only to have the entire, meat-loving topping spew onto the 500 degrees pizza stone and bake to ashen smithereens before they could even scream.
The mess certainly cannot be removed by “lightly scrubbing it with water (although this is rarely necessary),” as Ooni’s website puts it.
Which is to say, you have never seen the staff here at the Digital Life Labs attempt to review your very fun and now very filthy pizza oven. Sorry to tell you, but we need a fire hose after the mess we’ve made of it.
Although I fear the stone in the Bluetooth-enabled, high-tech pizza oven is now irreparably stained with burnt-out pizza gizzards, the stone does have two sides to it, and once we get a handle on making pizza dough that doesn’t stick to a pizza peel (a misnomer if ever there was one) we’ll simply turn the stone over for a fresh start.
I, for one, can’t wait. We’ve had a lot of fun, and our early attempts – with the notable exception of the fourth attempt, which in the moments before its cremation looked more like a novel meat-and-cheese trifle than traditional Italian dish – were surprisingly delicious, even if they were, well, square.
And I do mean “moments”. We used an infrared thermometer gun to measure the temperature of the pizza stone inside the Koda Pro 2, and it really does get up to the advertised 500 degrees. The hottest we recorded was 510 degrees at the back of the oven.
At 500 degrees, every second counts. Pizza dough will rise before your eyes, and start to burn in little more than a minute. Steak will get a fabulous, even crust in a minute, too, though it will likely need a reverse sear in the oven afterwards, or it will need pre-cooking in a sous vide bath, or whatever your preferred method is.
We experimented with flat breads, too, and got delicious results very quickly.
One downside is the Koda 2 Pro only offers a Bluetooth connection between the oven and your phone for that remote monitoring. Other digital BBQs we’ve reviewed have a Wi-Fi connection, which allows you to stray much farther from the backyard and still keep an eye on things. With a Wi-Fi connection to the internet, you could rush to the shops to grab some ingredient you forgot and still remain updated by the app.
In contrast, the Bluetooth connection to the Ooni oven would often drop out when we left the backyard of the Labs to venture inside, making it less useful than it might be.
That said, remote monitoring on a pizza oven is far less important than it is on, say, a smoker BBQ, which might take many hours to complete a cook. Once you’ve started cooking at pizza-oven temperatures, you have to attend to the cook at 10- or 20-second intervals, so forget about dashing to the shops. The 80-centimetre length of a pizza turning peel is about as remote as you can get.
It’s worth noting that the app doesn’t extend to controlling the temperature of the Koda 2 Pro, either. There’s no thermostat, no digital control in this oven, and temperature is set like it might be on a gas cooktop: you turn the gas up for hotter and down for cooler.
Turning the oven down is something we wish we had done the first time we tried searing a steak in the oven. The maximum heat wasn’t too much for the steak itself – that came out great on our very first attempt. But 500 degrees was too much for the lovingly seasoned cast-iron griddle we pre-heated along with the oven, that shed its seasoning oil and flash-rusted pretty well the moment it cooled down.
And no amount of water is getting that rust off, let me tell you. It’s going to need chemicals and a wire brush mounted to an angle grinder for sure.
