One of the most popular additions to home kitchens and outdoor spaces is pizza ovens. They offer a unique and delightful way to cook delicious, restaurant-quality pizzas. But owning a pizza oven is just the beginning. To truly elevate your pizza-making experience, investing in quality accessories is essential.
This article has listed pizza oven accessories that will enhance the cooking process and ensure the best results. You will also learn how to pick the accessories that fit your style of cooking.
Must-Have Pizza Oven Accessories
1. Baking Steel
Making pizza at home is much easier with baking steel at hand. This will enable the creation of a good pizza crust. Like a cast iron pan, it needs some regular maintenance and seasoning. Not only that, you can use it as a pan for bacon, burgers, and other things or bake bread on it.
2. Bench Scraper
Another useful instrument for baking is a bench scraper, which facilitates dough workability. Its handle is comfortable and non-slip, and its stainless steel blade is durable. This utility lets you pick up the dough, scrape off any dry pieces caught, cut large rounds into smaller ones, or gather chopped herbs and veggies.
3. Cleaning Tools
To deep clean the oven inside between pizza parties at home, you need a putty knife, a metal brush, an ash rake, a vacuum crevice tool, and oven cleaning spray. You can keep the oven in great shape by removing ash, food scraps, and tough spots.
4. Cutting Board
You can roll out pizza dough, chop toppings, and slice pies after they're done cooking on a big wooden cutting board just for that purpose. Pizzas are kept on separate boards from other things so they don't get contaminated.
5. Dough Box
A plastic dough box that doesn't let air in keeps dough balls or bulk dough from drying out and increases the time they can be kept in the fridge. Clear lids make it easy to quickly see how many dough balls are left.
6. Dough Rolling Pin
If you want to spread and smooth dough evenly without tearing it, use a wooden rolling pin with a tapered French style. To keep the dough pieces from sticking to the wood, sprinkle them with flour. Evenly baked pizzas need smooth dough.
7. Fire Extinguisher
Keep a small, all-purpose fire extinguisher close to the pizza oven in case of any grease or electricity fires. Prepare yourself by learning how to use it correctly so you can quickly put out a pizza oven fire if you need to.
8. Gas Oven Ignition Tool
For gas-powered pizza ovens, you need grill lighters that are long enough to reach into the burner tube hole and safely light the oven. With an extendable stick lighter, your hands stay away from the flame. Be careful and use it with the right care.
9. Infrared Thermometer Gun
Maintaining optimum wood-fired pizza oven performance depends on closely monitoring the temperatures. You can check temperatures in specific areas using an infrared thermometer gun. This ensures that, before you begin cooking, your oven is always in the ideal temperature range—700°F to 900°F. Using infrared guns relieves you of guessing and temperature concerns.
10. Kitchen Scale
For most flour-based recipes, accuracy is key to making great pizza dough. A cooking scale is the best accessory for this. With a kitchen scale, you can weigh out every item, from the crust's flour and water to the toppings and decorations.
11. Oven Camera
Install a camera inside the oven with a heat-shielded lens and connect it to a TV or tablet outside for fun. You can watch the pies cook and the cheese melt from the patio, where they are safe.
12. Oven Gloves and Mitts
When working with a very hot pizza oven, you need to be careful not to get burned. Heat-resistant gloves and mitts let you safely get finished pizzas out of the oven and handle hot tools. Leather gloves for welding may also work well, but oven mitts made to withstand temperatures up to 600 to 800°F are more flexible.
13. Pizza Cutter Wheel
When your delicious pizzas are done cooking, you will need a good pizza cutter wheel to cut them into neat pieces that you can enjoy. Strong stainless steel circle cutter wheels with easy-grip handles cut pies quickly without breaking the crust.
14. Floor Brush
Over time, the floors of stone ovens can get dirty with baked-on flour and grease. A special curved bristle brush made for pizza oven floors can be used to scrub and clean the cooking surface so that it stays well-heated and the dough comes off easily after baking.
15. Pizza Peel
This special pizza peel might be the most important tool for a pizza oven. The big, flat surface and long handle make putting pizzas together, moving them, turning them, and getting them back easy. Pizza peels made of strong wood or metal keep food from sticking. The surface has holes in it that make it easier to slide.
In addition, putting pizzas in the oven is easiest with the wood peel, but getting slices that won't fit on the bigger paddle is easier with the smaller metal peel. Also, the metal surface with holes won't soak up grease and water over time like wood does. As such, the metal peel is ideal for dividing up made pies.
16. Smoke and CO Detector
Putting a battery-powered carbon monoxide and smoke detector on the wall above your outdoor pizza oven is an extra safety step that will let you know if there are any gas or chimney problems. This keeps you safe while you're using the live fire cooking tool.
17. Stainless Steel Table
If you put a strong stainless steel table next to your pizza oven, you can use it as a stable work surface to put together fresh pizzas, toppings, and tools right at the oven's opening. With the optional wheels, you can move the foldable table where needed.
18. Weatherproof Cover
When you're not using your outdoor pizza oven, a weatherproof plastic cover keeps it safe from bad weather. The cover stays in place with straps. Just make sure to fully open before preheating the oven so that dangerous heat doesn't get trapped.
Factors to Consider When Choosing Pizza Oven Accessories
Of course, it’s not necessary to buy all the accessories listed here for your pizza oven and cooking experience. For you to decide which are the only ones you should buy, consider the following factors below:
Multitasker Tools
Having a lot of unused tools might not be ideal if you only make pizza occasionally. However, many of the ingredients for great pizza can also be used in other types of cooking.
For example, a bench scraper is a great tool for keeping a small kitchen clean that doesn't take up much space. An infrared thermometer is essential for tasks like checking if a steak is cooked or monitoring the temperature while deep-frying.
Oven Type
You can make some great pizza at home with the oven you already have in your kitchen. To get the crust and cheese that look like they came from a restaurant oven, you'll need a pizza stone or pan that can hold a lot of heat.
If you like pizza, getting a pizza oven is a big step. These ovens can be used inside or outside, and they get almost twice as hot as your home oven's highest setting. Some use wood as fuel for a smoky, Neapolitan-style taste. To use a pizza oven properly, you need to know how to use it and have tools like an extended pizza peel.
Storage Space
There isn't much room in the kitchen, and pizza tools sometimes need a lot of it. Because pizza ovens are big and heavy, it takes work to move them or put them away. If your pizza oven is outside, you might want to set it up separately so that the fuel, tools, and oven are all in one place and can be protected from the weather.
Many pizza stones or steels can live in the oven, which saves some room for things that you can cook inside. Finding a place to store long-handled pizza peels in drawers can be hard. One solution is to hang them on the wall.
Take Your Pizza to the Next Level
By purchasing good pizza oven accessories, you can greatly improve the experience of making pizza at home. These tools are must-haves for anyone who loves pizza. For instance, a pizza peel or baking steel will help you get the perfect crispy crust, and heat-resistant gloves will keep your hands safe when handling hot things.
No matter how experienced you are as a cook, having the right tools can make the process more fun, and the food taste better. So, buy the best pizza oven accessories, fire up your pizza oven, and enjoy the art of making perfect pizzas at home.