There was a lot to love about the gas-powered Ooni Koda, which made pizzas almost as perfect as our top pick, but costs significantly less.
The Ooni Koda’s heat source is in the back of the oven, providing the cooking food with direct access to the flame. We loved that the cooking stone is removable, and you can flip it upside down to clean it during the next cooking session. The legs also fold all the way down, making the already thin-profiled oven almost flat for storage.
It only took five minutes for the pizza stone to register 500°F, and 25 minutes to reach 900°F. The Neapolitan-style pizza cooked in about 90 seconds and resulted in beautifully charred spots on the crust and a gorgeous speckled bottom. The oven recovered quickly to cook a second pizza without issue, and it did a similarly fantastic job searing steak and charring broccoli in a cast-iron skillet.
While we were thrilled with this less expensive oven’s results, it is worth noting that we did encounter some issues with the original Ooni Koda we received.
After a few cooking sessions, the flames extinguished, and we couldn’t get the unit to turn back on. A piece on the plastic ignition knob had also broken, causing the knob to spin around and around.
Ooni’s customer service was fantastic, sending us a replacement knob. When that didn’t resolve the issue, they sent a new oven. We put the new oven through the same rigorous trials as the first one, and couldn’t get the issue to replicate, so we must have had a defective unit the first time around.