One of the debates when mulling over buying a pizza oven is the six (or more) months of the year when a British back garden isn’t the ideal place for hosting an outdoor cooking event.
That’s where the appeal of the Ooni Volt comes in, which is an the electric pizza oven that you can use all winter long indoors. While the original Volt came out in 2023, its now undergone a redesign with a slimmed down footprint and a more affordable RRP to compete with the best pizza ovens on the market.
Launching on the 1st of October, you can register your interest now via the Ooni website for when it launches. Here’s how it differs from the Volt that I reviewed this time last year.
Kitted out with ‘Pizza Intelligence’ programs, this new and improved oven has a huge range of temperatures for proving your dough and firing up your pizzas.
The original indoor oven from Ooni, the Volt proved very popular with its release in 2023.
So what’s different here? The first thing I noticed was the new smaller size. Where the original Volt was pretty ungainly, this 2.0 version is 30% slimmer and according to the brand, ‘can fit in a standard kitchen cupboard when not in use’. You can still fire up 13-inch pizzas with it, but it’ll take up far less space on your kitchen worktop.
It also features a sleeker look, with contrast colours, a more refined digital interface and a viewing window that’s much larger, so you can watch how your pizza is getting on.
But what will be most exciting to home pizza chefs is the new ‘Pizza Intelligence’ presets, which allow you to try out Neopolitan, Thin & Crispy and Pan Pizzas at the touch of a button.
Once you’ve selected one of these settings, the oven will automatically adjust the temperature of the oven for you, as well as ‘balance heat between the top and base heating elements’ and ‘minimise temperature fluctuations and cold spots’, according to Ooni.
There’s a huge range of temperatures with this oven too, from 20 to 450°C. You can use the lowest setting for proving your pizza dough or other breads and then fire up to the highest temperature quickly (in 20 minutes according to Ooni) in order to get the heat you need for a crispy base.
As someone who has tried the orignal Volt, I recognise the need for a lot of these tweaks to the design. While I love using my oven to host winter time pizza parties, storing such a large indoor oven is sometimes a headache and the interface could be a lot more intuitive for beginners.
One of the only kickers with the Volt 2.0 is that it can only be used indoors, so when the sun does shine, your pizza party chef will be running those pizzas through to your guests outside.
What do you make of this new and improved indoor oven?
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