Owning a home pizza oven will no doubt make you popular amongst your friends and family but is it all it's cracked up to be?
We tested out the DeliVita Pizza oven to find out more.
What is the DeliVita Pizza oven?
Weighing just 30kg, this stylish pizza oven is hand made in Yorkshire and will cook authentic wood-fire cooked pizzas that are ready to tuck into in around 90 seconds.
It has heatproof handles and an oven base, meaning it can be positioned anywhere in your garden that is sturdy enough to safely bear the oven weight.
Owner and founder of DeliVita Joe Formisano says: “I created DeliVita out of frustration that I couldn’t find an outdoor wood-fired oven that didn’t take hours to heat up and wasn’t so heavy it couldn’t be moved or wasted fuel.
I wanted the oven to be efficient and eco-friendly plus it had to look good. It also has to be part of the social occasion so people can sit around while you cook. It needed to be portable and sit on a table top without burning."
Buy the DeliVita Pizza oven
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delivita.com
Product specifications
• Dimensions: 65 × 59 × 35 cm
• Weight: 30 kg
• Outdoor use only
• Make in the UK
Using the DeliVita Pizza Oven
Upon receiving it, unpacking the DeliVita Pizza Oven was quick and easy. Before we got started, we had a call with Marco, brand ambassador for DeliVita's who was able to talk us through exactly what we needed to do, offering us lots of helpful hints and tips.
As well as being incredibly lovely, Marco's role is to support customers and educate them about the DeliVita ovens.
All customers receive a call to talk them through the process of how to cure, light and maintain their new oven and there is also access to lots of online tutorials and additional support if required.
Having this one-to-one was incredibly helpful and I really got a sense of how important the customer journey was for the brand.
Getting started was easy, all you need to do is pop a firelighter in the centre at the back of the oven and place a tower of kindling around it before lighting the firelighter.
The oven efficiently reaches a temperature of around 500°C in just 25 minutes and we were impressed that it remained safe to touch on the outside despite this.
While you can of course make your own pizza dough, you can also buy dough directly from DeliVita and keep it frozen until you need it. As well as the traditional dough balls, there are loads of options including gluten-free bases and even charcoal activated dough!
After proofing our dough, we stretched it out, spread over the tomato pizza sauce and added our toppings. To be honest, the hardest part of using the pizza oven was actually getting the pizza from our kitchen surface, onto the pizza peel and then into the oven! It requires a lot of shuffling but the trick, we found, is semolina which makes a real difference.
The excitement of waiting for your pizza to cook never gets old and because it cooks so quickly, you ideally need to be on standby anyway, ready to turn it and then finally remove it from the oven.
I'd be lying if I said our pizzas were perfect straight away because they weren't. But we found this was more a case of being overexcited and the oven not being hot enough or just stretching the dough too thin. But we quickly learnt the do's and don'ts and after all, practice makes perfect.
It's worth remembering that however good a pizza oven may be, there are other variables such as temperature and pizza dough that can impact the finished result and while it did take us a couple of pizzas to get to a point of feeling confident using the oven, soon we were producing delicious 12″ wood-fired pizzas that would easily be a match for your Tuesday night Domino's Pizza.
Although we only used it for cooking pizza, you can also use it to cook meat, fish, veggies and even bread too.
When you're all finished, simply wipe the outside with a damp cloth and brush the inside with the oven brush.
We really liked that thanks to the polished fibreglass shell. we could just leave the pizza oven outside in all weathers, although we did use an all-weather cover just in case.
What are the pros?
It's a really nice touch that the DeliVita oven is available in seven gorgeous colourways (my favourite is the Berry Hot) which adds a nice splash of colour to your garden.
Although it can take a little getting used to if you've not cooked by wood-burning, it's seriously easy to use. Just be sure to keep an eye on it!
Aside from pizza, the oven is spacious enough for the likes of a roasting tray so you could cook a leg of lamb, a whole chicken or a vegetable medley. This might make the cost feel a bit more justifiable.
It's so easy to maintain and keep clean too, compared to a barbecue that requires a good scrub, with the DeliVita most of the ash is taken care of by the fire, you might just need to sweep the rest out with the metal wire brush.
We couldn't fault the end results of the pizzas - they were absolutely delicious and I'm confident the craftsmanship of the DeliVita had a big hand in that.
What are the cons?
There's no getting around that at £1,295, it's an expensive buy and there are cheaper options available through brands such as Ooni if pizza making is something you'll probably only do occasionally.
Related: Read our review of the Ooni Karu 12
It's also likely that you'll need to pick up accessories too which ranges from the Pizza Peel at £54.50 to the Pizza Cutter at £44.50. It really can add up but then this would be the case for any pizza oven you buy and you can shop around for cheaper accessories.
I would have liked to have seen at least a Pizza Peel included and I think a built-in temperature gauge would have been really useful.
Although DeliVita says the oven is portable enough to take with you to friends and families, you'll still need two people to stick it in the car and I'm not sure you'd bother but it's nice to have the option.
Is it worth the money?
Without testing other pizza ovens, it's hard to say. If cheaper pizza ovens provide the same tasty results, it's hard to justify the higher price point of the DeliVita oven, however good it looks.
There's no doubt that the DeliVita pizza oven will last for years. It's built to do so and will take everything you throw at it so in that sense - absolutely.
I see it as one of those buys in a decades time you'll be announcing: "Oh that old thing? Got it back in 2021 and it's still as good as the day we bought it!"
Would you recommend the DeliVita Pizza Oven?
Absolutely, it's a beautiful, well-crafted piece of kit that looks great in our garden and has made us very popular with friends and family as well as many admiring glances.
We actually threw a couple of pizza parties over the summer where guests were invited to make their own pizzas before sliding it into the oven and watching it cook and this offered a brilliant (and different!) way of getting together with friends and family where everyone could get stuck in. And it certainly worked out cheaper too!
That said, I do think that you need to be serious about your pizza making to invest in this particular brand of pizza oven. But if you do, you seriously won't regret it. Even after months of using the DeliVita pizza oven, we were still excited to get to use it when the sun was shining.