Pizza Oven Buyer's Guide: What Do You Need to Consider?
If you’re considering getting ‘a pizza the action’ by adding freshly baked pizza to your restaurant menu, investing in a commercial pizza oven will help you achieve the impressive temperatures and cooking conditions required to give your doughy delights a fantastic finish.
Much like choosing the best combination of toppings for a pizza, selecting the right type of commercial pizza oven for your business requires careful consideration. To help ensure you cover all of your (pizza) bases effectively, we’ve rounded up the main points you need to ponder before you place your order. With our restaurant pizza oven buyer’s guide, choosing the right kit for your kitchen is as easy as 1,2,3:
1) Decide which type of pizza you want to serve
Different types of pizza require dough to be made and cooked in distinctive ways, and they are usually dressed with varying levels of toppings too. Whether you plan to create pizzas entirely from scratch yourself, or use pre-made frozen dough, will also factor into your buying decisions.
Generally speaking, deep pan pizzas with lots of toppings need to be cooked for longer and at a different temperature that a traditional Neapolitan or New York-style pizza, which is revered for the crispy base, but usually lighter on toppings. The latter is usually best fired quickly, ‘kissing’ a pizza stone in very high temperature wood fired, gas or electric pizza oven. It’s the stone bottom, along with the high temperature, that helps you achieve a crispier base.
Incidentally, if you’d like to go down the path to making truly authentic Neapolitan style pizza and dream of becoming one of the few pizzerias outside of Italy to be certified by the Vera Pizza Napoletana, you’ll first need a dome-shaped wood fired oven.
2) Calculate the volume of pizza you want to produce
Is pizza going to be the main thing on your menu, or simply an addition to it? Having a rough idea of the volume of pizza you could sell, based on the size of your restaurant and your menu, will give you an indication of how many you may need to cook at any one time.
A single deck pizza oven or convection oven can cook only a few medium-sized pizzas at a time, so if you want to offer larger pizzas or are likely to need to produce more at any one time you’ll need to consider a larger oven or perhaps a double deck pizza oven.
3) Factor in space, size and installation restrictions
Where are you planning to put your pizza oven? Does it need to fit in a corner of your kitchen? Will you be building your premises around your ultimate pizza oven, or does it need to be a much smaller scale affair that fits on your kitchen bench top?
A large dome-shaped wood-fired oven isn’t a practical choice for lots of kitchens for a multitude of reasons. Firstly, lack of space on premises can make wood or coal fired ovens an impossibility, or you may not be able to accommodate the extreme temperatures that these ovens run at.
You must also consider the requirement that permanent commercial solid fuel burning ovens must be licensed. And then there’s the actual installation; how would you put a heavy oven in place? Large brick ovens can be difficult to accommodate in established kitchens.
Gas fired, or electric pizza ovens from Lockhart Catering Equipment offer a more convenient style of cooking that can reach the required high temperatures, along with traditional cooking features such as stone bottoms.
We hope that our pizza oven buying guide has helped you to determine which type of pizza oven would be best for your restaurant, but don’t forget to consider the utensils that you also need to serve your pizza perfectly. Our range of pizza pans and utensils includes pizza peel and lifters, pizza cutting wheels, and pan grippers to ensure you’re fully equipped. Don’t forget to take a look at our other buyer’s guides too for more handy tips on choosing the right commercial catering equipment for your restaurant or business.
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