Ooni Koda 12, two years after (pizza oven review)


AFTER TWO YEARS, my Ooni Koda 12 pizza oven is looking good and performing really well, just as a new one. It is worth the investment!

I really love how easy it is to clean the pizza stone after burnt flour accumulates or epsecially if disaster happens – just turn it around and the high heat of next few cooks will clean it – self-cleaning!

I had almost no issues with the dial although I really wish for two things here: that the marks would be clearer (white) and that dial itself would be position at the side of the oven, not the back. I often cook pizza late when the day light is poor or in a garage with poor light and often the cart is pushed back to the wall so I can’t use dial precisely but by feeling.

Before/during cooking pizza I also use two essential tools to make handling pizza easier – first is IR thermometer with laser to check the stone is hot enough (~430 degrees Celsius) and perforated peel for launching and turning pizza. They were all bought at Ooni online stone and are doing the job as expected. At the start I have used (generic) wooden pizza peel for launching and Ooni perforated pizza peel for turning without checking the temperature but after switching to measuring temperature and using only perforated pizza peel, I started to get better results: less disasters because I tried to rotate pizza while crust still really soft due to stone not being hot enough and less flour on the stone because it escaped through perforation.

I recently decided to also buy their turning peel to up my pizza game! I expect it would require some practice. 🙂

I secretly want to get my hands on Ooni Koda 16 because I really like the L-shaped flame and bigger space/opening it provides – not because I would like to cook bigger pizzas per se but because you can see more easily/clearly what’s going on inside the oven and gives you more space to manoeuvre the pizza.

For the end of review of this fantastic pizza oven, this is my current go-to recipe for making great pizza dough:

  • always rye sourdough starter (usually 10 % of flour weight)
  • Manitoba 00 flour
  • 63 % hydration
  • each pizza ball is around 240 g (usually make 4 of them)
  • mix with stand mixer, couple of stretch and folds in a span of 5 hours, make pizza balls, then cold fermentation for 1.5 days, taken out 6 hours on a room temperature before stretching
  • rice flour for stretching
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