Note that you might have to set the temperature on the top heating element a bit higher than the presets suggest in order to fully cook your cheese. Or not. Let’s just say you don’t always know how it’s going to go, but it’ll mostly come out all right when you’re aiming at New York–style or thin-crust pies.
Short-cook, high-temp pizza is more of a dice roll. And if you’re making multiple pizzas, you’ll probably need 5 to 7 minutes between them to get back to temp after opening the oven.
To Fry or Not to Fry
Unfortunately, the stone offers no thermal mass as ground cover for the thermostat while on the baking or air frying settings. If you want to use this as your standard accessory oven, you will run the risk of cooking temps being zany by 30 to 50 degrees in one direction or another. At lower temperatures especially, the oven tends to run cold.
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Photograph: Gourmia
The oven gets more accurate at about 425 degrees Fahrenheit, which is lucky: A lot of recipes and frozen foods tend to fall into this range. But unless you feel like using temperature probes for all food, the oven will be tough to trust when you’re doing something that requires more precision than toasting bread or reheating leftovers.
I tried wings multiple ways, one of my standard tests for air fryers. Temperatures varied widely across the surface of the fryer basket, with cool temps at the sides and near the door. The fan from the back of the device didn’t manage much more than a strong breeze, meaning this oven’s “air fryer” function is closer to old-school convection oven. True crispness was unattainable. If you throw away an air fryer or toaster oven to make room for the Gourmia, you’ll probably soon miss it.
A Gateway Oven
Whatever the oven’s inherent limitations, the internet is littered with blissfully happy customers of this Gourmia All-In-One, or the even cheaper Walmart version without the extra cooking functions.
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Photograph: Gourmia
The reason is simple: It fills, for some, a desperate need. At a price far below the top-line models, this pizza oven can attain 800-degree temperatures, can cook indoors or in a garage during cold winters when you’re probably not out building wood fires, and will probably smoke a little but not a lot. Keep your windows open, or turn on your vent fans.
You can nail the heck out of a Neapolitan-ish pizza, experiment with dough hydration, and meditate on New York’s great contribution to world cuisine. You can, for relatively low admission, decide whether pizza making will become a hobby.
If you do, then you will probably kick this ladder away eventually. The Gourmia is a gateway oven, one that will inevitably send you either back to your local pizzeria or to a much more expensive and reliable Ooni electric that you may, like WIRED gear team editor Adrienne So, begin to treat like a member of your family. With this low-cost oven, you get what you pay for. On the bright side, you do get something.
