Eating outside in the garden is one of the joys of summer and although cooking on a barbecue has been the traditional way to entertain outdoors, it's now easy to create delicious pizza in your garden too, thanks to a thriving market in freestanding pizza ovens.
Perfect for placing on top of a picnic table, portable pizza ovens are fuelled by wood, charcoal or gas. Authentic restaurantcooked pizza has a flavour and look that's impossible to replicate in a regular kitchen oven, but these compact steel ovens give the heat required to cook the best pizza, often twice the temperature of a regular oven, and take just 15-30 minutes to heat up. Flames roll across the roof on the inside of the oven to heat the stone, giving the crisp base that pizza enthusiasts love and cooking the toppings to perfection in just a few minutes.
Quick and easy to use, a pizza oven is a great way to make the most of your garden on a summer evening. Once it has cooled down it can simply be stored away in the shed or covered until the next time.
But home-cooked pizza doesn't come cheap, with prices starting just under £80 and rising to £800 and beyond. To help you find an oven that suits your garden, and your pocket, we joined forces with our colleagues at BBC Good Food to test a range of portable pizza ovens, fuelled by gas, wood or a barbecue, to see what you get for less than £400.
How we tested
We built and used each oven exactly as you would in your garden, testing with different pizza recipes where oven capacity allowed. The ovens were assessed according to the following criteria, with equal marks attributed to each: I Assembly and storage We examined the ease of assembly, the clarity of instructions and how long it took to build the oven. We also noted any storage features, and how easy it was to pack up and put away.
This story is from the June 2023 edition of BBC Gardeners World.
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This story is from the June 2023 edition of BBC Gardeners World.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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We love June
We're cruising towards midsummer: this is a month full of love and abundance. Wherever you look there will be something in your garden that lifts the spirits and makes you glad to be alive. We have colour to cheer us, we have leaves that still have the bounce and freshness of small puppies, we have the first berries fattening up, there are birds frantically parenting very demanding broods of chicks, the bees are all over the place, it's prime barbecue and picnic season, and we have lawns as lush and green as billiard tables. What a month to fall in love.
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