Pizza Ovens for the Garden: Gas, Wood or Multi-Fuel?

There's a particular kind of joy that comes from sliding a raw pizza onto a screaming-hot stone, watching the cornicione puff and blister in front of your eyes, and pulling out something leopard-spotted and gloriously charred barely a minute later. It's the sort of thing that, until fairly recently, you could only get from a proper pizzeria with a brick-built dome. Now you can have it in the garden, often for less than the price of a decent barbecue.

But the moment you start shopping, you hit the great fork in the road: gas, wood or multi-fuel? It's the single biggest decision you'll make, and it shapes everything that follows — how much you'll spend on fuel, how long you'll wait before the first pizza, how much faffing about you'll do, and, crucially, how the pizza actually tastes. I've spent a fair while cooking on all three types, and I want to walk you through exactly how they differ, with real numbers rather than marketing fluff.

Whether you fancy a portable gas oven you can fire up on a whim, a traditional wood-fired beast that perfumes the whole street, or a hybrid that lets you hedge your bets, this guide will help you pick the right one. Let's get into it.

The Three Fuel Types at a Glance

Before we dive deep, here's the broad shape of things. Gas ovens prioritise convenience and consistency. Wood-fired ovens chase authenticity and flavour. Multi-fuel ovens try to give you the best of both, with a switchable burner. Each approach has genuine strengths and genuine compromises, and there's no single "best" — only the best for how you actually cook.

One myth worth busting straight away: the idea that wood ovens take dramatically longer to get going than gas. In my experience, on smaller and mid-sized ovens, wood and gas heat-up times are roughly the same — it's the oven's shape, mass and insulation that make the real difference, not the fuel itself. A compact, well-insulated wood oven like the DeliVita reaches cooking temperature in around 25 minutes, which is barely slower than a gas Ooni Koda 16's 20 minutes. It's the big, heavy, freestanding wood ovens — the ones with serious thermal mass — that can take an hour to come up to heat. So when someone tells you "wood is always slower," take it with a pinch of salt; it depends entirely on the oven.

Gas Ovens: Convenience That Just Works

If you want pizza on a weeknight without committing to a small bonfire, gas is the obvious answer. You twist a dial, hit the ignition, and roughly 15 to 20 minutes later you're cooking. There's no kindling, no flame management, no ash to rake out at the end. For a lot of people — and I'd include most beginners here — that convenience is worth more than any flavour debate.

The category is well served. The Ooni Koda 16 has become something of a default recommendation, and for good reason: it takes 16-inch pizzas, reaches up to 500°C, heats up in around 20 minutes, and cooks a pizza in about 60 seconds. It weighs 18.2kg, folds its legs flat for transport, and uses an instant gas ignition system so there's no fiddling with a lighter. Ooni back it with a one-year warranty as standard, extended to five years free when you register the oven with them — a nice touch that signals confidence in the build.

At the smaller, more portable end sits the Ooni Koda 2, a compact gas model that's ideal if storage space is tight or you want something genuinely grab-and-go. The Gozney Tread is another portable gas option pitched at people who want to take their oven to the park, the beach or a mate's garden.

Gozney's Arc and Arc XL deserve special mention because they bring a more premium feel to the gas category. The Arc XL handles 16-inch pizzas and cooks them in 60 seconds or less, using a lateral gas burner that pushes flame across the roof for even heat distribution, paired with a 20mm-thick removable cordierite stone floor. It reaches 500°C (950°F), and includes a digital temperature gauge with marked cooking zones so you can read the heat at a glance rather than guessing. The oven weighs 58.5lb on its own (73lb boxed), and its external footprint is 530mm wide, 629mm deep and 342mm tall, with a generous internal cooking chamber of 427mm × 517mm × 173mm. The Arc and Arc XL launched recently, in the 2025–2026 window, and they feel like a deliberate move to make gas ovens look and feel less like camping gear and more like serious garden kit.

The thing gas can't quite replicate is the flavour. There's no smoke, so you don't get that faint woodsmoke note in the crust that wood-fired purists rave about. Honestly, for a lot of pizzas — especially heavily topped ones — you'd struggle to tell the difference blind. But for a simple Margherita, where the crust does the heavy lifting, the wood character is noticeable. Whether that matters to you is the whole question.

Wood-Fired Ovens: Flavour and Theatre

Now for the romantic option. A wood fire does something gas simply can't: it perfumes the crust with smoke, throws out a living, dancing flame, and turns cooking into an event. There's a reason restaurants still build wood-fired domes despite the extra hassle — that flavour is the genuine article, and the spectacle of feeding logs into a roaring fire is half the fun.

The DeliVita Wood-Fired oven is one of the loveliest examples of the breed at the portable end. It's a handcrafted, tabletop unit made from fibreglass with an insulated base, weighing just under 30kg. It heats up in around 25 minutes, reaches up to 550°C — hotter than most gas ovens — and cooks a 12-inch pizza in roughly 90 seconds. DeliVita recommend kiln-dried hardwood (logs or wood pellets) for the cleanest burn, and they back the oven with a five-year guarantee. It's available in a refined range of standard colours, with RAL-code customisation if you want it to match a specific scheme — which tells you something about who it's aimed at. This is an oven designed to be seen, not hidden in the shed. It first appeared back in 2016 and has remained in production ever since, which is a decent vote of confidence in the design.

At the more affordable, accessible end, the Dellonda Portable Wood-Fired 14-inch oven is a tabletop unit that runs on charcoal or sustainable hardwood pellets. Its clever party trick is a manual turning dial that rotates the pizza stone, so you can spin your pizza evenly past the hottest part of the fire without reaching in with a peel. It accommodates 12-inch pizzas and comes with long wooden handles for safe handling. It's a sensible entry point for anyone curious about wood without wanting to commit to a heavy freestanding dome.

For those who do want the full experience, traditional freestanding wood-fired ovens — the Royal Wood Fired Pizza Oven being one example of the classic standing style — give you that proper brick-oven look and a serious slab of thermal mass. The trade-off is heat-up time: a big wood oven can take an hour to come fully up to temperature, and it demands more fuel and more attention. But once it's hot, it stays hot, and it'll cook pizza after pizza with the heat radiating from the dome.

The Skill Curve

Here's the honest bit: wood-fired cooking has a learning curve. Managing a live fire — keeping the flame rolling across the roof, knowing when to add fuel, balancing the heat between the stone and the dome — takes practice. Your first few pizzas may char on one side while the base stays pale, or vice versa. With wood ovens that lack a rotating stone, you'll be turning pizzas constantly with a peel to get an even bake. It's deeply satisfying once it clicks, but it's not the point-and-shoot experience gas offers.

Multi-Fuel Ovens: The Best of Both Worlds?

And so to the compromise candidate — the multi-fuel, or dual-fuel, oven. The pitch is simple and seductive: light wood when you want flavour and theatre, switch to a gas burner when you want speed and consistency. One oven, two personalities. For a lot of people who can't decide, this is the answer to the whole dilemma.

The Ooni Karu 12 is one of the standard-bearers here. It runs on wood pellets, charcoal or gas via a switchable burner, and includes a door and a smoking chimney to create a properly wood-fired environment when you want it. It has a built-in digital thermometer, though — and this is sound advice for any pizza oven — it's worth using a separate infrared temperature gun to check the stone surface directly, because the air temperature and the stone temperature can differ significantly, and the stone is what actually cooks your base.

The Solo Stove Pi Prime is another well-regarded multi-fuel option, and Alfa produce ovens in both gas and multi-fuel configurations for those wanting a larger, more permanent installation. The category is clearly a growth area, too: DeliVita have leaned into it with the Flow Dual Fuel oven, newly launched in 2026 and shortlisted in the T3 Awards 2026, alongside the Chef Plus Dual-Fuel model that pairs a gas burner with wood capability. When an established wood-oven specialist starts building dual-fuel models, it tells you the market has decided hybrids are here to stay.

The practical benefit I keep coming back to is the heat-up advantage. A hybrid setup — wood fire plus a gas assist — can reach cooking temperature roughly 10 to 20 minutes faster than wood alone, because the gas does the heavy lifting of bringing the chamber up while the wood adds its character on top. You can also start a session on gas for speed, then throw a few pieces of wood in once you're rolling to layer in some smoke. That flexibility is genuinely useful in real-world cooking.

The downsides? A multi-fuel oven is a slightly more complex bit of kit, with a removable gas burner to store and maintain. You're also, in a sense, paying for two systems even if you only ever use one. And no hybrid is quite as effortless as a dedicated gas oven, nor quite as soulfully "proper" as a dedicated wood dome. It's a compromise — a very good one, but a compromise nonetheless.

Speed Showdown: How Fast Does Each Get You Eating?

Speed breaks down into two parts: how long until the oven is ready, and how long each pizza takes once it is. On the second point, there's barely anything in it — at proper temperature, every oven type here cooks a pizza in 60 to 90 seconds with lovely leopard spotting. The Ooni Koda 16 manages 60 seconds, the Gozney Arc XL 60 seconds or less, the DeliVita around 90 seconds, and even the electrically rotating Morso Forno Spin lands at 1 to 2 minutes. The fuel barely matters once you're hot.

Where the difference lives is in heat-up. Here's how the times stack up across the models I've covered:

The takeaway is clear. For pure speed-to-first-pizza, gas wins — 15 to 20 minutes flat. But a compact wood oven at 25 minutes is only marginally behind, and a hybrid with gas assist closes the gap entirely. The only real slow coach is the big freestanding wood oven at around an hour, and even that's a one-off cost at the start of a session that's then good for hours of cooking. If you're someone who wants pizza on a whim, gas; if you're planning a leisurely afternoon, the heat-up time of wood barely registers.

Flavour Face-Off: Does Fuel Really Change the Taste?

This is the question that starts arguments at barbecues, so let me be as honest as I can. Yes, fuel changes the taste — but less than the internet would have you believe, and the difference is concentrated in one place: the crust.

Wood fire imparts a subtle smokiness to the cornicione and the base. On a plain Margherita, where the dough is the star, it's a genuine, pleasant addition — a faint, woody complexity that gas can't produce. Gas, by contrast, gives you an exceptionally clean bake with no off-notes, which some people actually prefer; it lets the tomato, mozzarella and basil sing without smoke interfering. Neither is "better" in any objective sense.

What matters far more than fuel for flavour is heat. All three fuel types, run correctly, hit the 400–500°C window that defines a true Neapolitan-style bake, and that intense heat is what creates the puffed, charred, tender-yet-crisp crust everyone's chasing. A wood oven run too cool will make worse pizza than a blazing-hot gas oven every single time. So if you take one thing away: get the temperature right first, and worry about smoke second. The DeliVita's ability to reach 550°C, for instance, does more for your pizza than the fact it burns wood.

The Clever Extras: Rotating Stones and Even Bakes

One of the perennial frustrations of pizza ovens is the hot spot. Most ovens — gas or wood — concentrate their heat at the back near the flame, which means one edge of your pizza chars while the front stays pale. The traditional fix is to keep spinning the pizza with a peel, which works but requires attention and a steady hand.

A growing number of ovens tackle this mechanically. The Morso Forno Spin is the standout here: a gas oven with an electrically activated rotating pizza stone. It turns a 40cm (15.7-inch) diameter stone at either 1.5 or 3.0 RPM, driven by a motor and powered by a 6kW burner, cooking a pizza in 1 to 2 minutes. It's a compact unit — 35cm tall, 53cm deep and 57cm wide, weighing 17kg — and the rotating stone means you get an even bake without lifting a finger. For anyone who finds peel-spinning fiddly, or who's cooking for a crowd and wants to focus on toppings rather than turning, that automation is a real boon.

Wood ovens have their own clever solutions too. The Dellonda Portable Wood-Fired oven uses a manual turning dial to rotate its stone, giving you the even-bake benefit of a rotating surface without needing a motor or electricity. It's a lovely bit of low-tech ingenuity — you simply twist the dial to spin your pizza past the hottest part of the fire. It won't be quite as effortless as the Morso's automatic motor, but it's a meaningful step up from wrestling with a peel, and it keeps the oven fully self-sufficient with no power required.

Portability and Storage: Where Will It Live?

It's easy to get carried away with flavour and speed and forget the dull-but-vital practicalities. Where will the oven actually live, and how often will you move it? This genuinely affects which fuel suits you.

Portable models dominate the gas and tabletop wood categories. The Ooni Koda 16 folds its legs flat and weighs 18.2kg — liftable, if a little awkward solo. The Ooni Koda 2 and Gozney Tread are designed expressly for grab-and-go use, light enough to take to a friend's garden or pack into the car. The Morso Forno Spin, at 17kg and compact dimensions, is similarly manageable. These tabletop ovens are perfect for smaller gardens, balconies or anyone who needs to stow the oven away between uses.

Wood ovens span a wider range. The DeliVita is a tabletop unit but weighs just under 30kg, so whilst portable, it's a two-person lift and not something you'll casually shuffle around. The Dellonda is a lighter tabletop affair with long wooden handles for safe carrying. At the other extreme, freestanding wood ovens and larger Alfa installations are essentially permanent garden fixtures — wonderful if you've got the space and want a statement piece, impractical if you're tight on room or want to bring the oven indoors over winter.

Running Costs: What You'll Actually Spend on Fuel

Fuel cost is the quiet factor that adds up over a season. Gas is wonderfully predictable: a standard 20lb propane tank lasts about 8 hours of cooking. Given each pizza takes around a minute, that's an enormous number of pizzas per bottle — you'll cook through dozens of gatherings before needing a refill, which makes the per-pizza fuel cost genuinely tiny and easy to budget for.

Wood is harder to pin down because it depends on the oven's appetite and the quality of fuel you buy. A compact, well-insulated wood oven like the DeliVita sips fuel relatively modestly once up to temperature, whilst a large freestanding dome with serious thermal mass will get through considerably more wood, especially during that hour-long heat-up. Buying quality kiln-dried hardwood or hardwood pellets costs more than damp logs from a garage forecourt, but it burns cleaner and hotter, so you ultimately use less and get better results. Treat it as an ongoing consumable rather than a one-off.

Multi-fuel ovens, naturally, sit wherever you point them. Run yours mostly on gas and your costs mirror a gas oven; lean on wood and they mirror a wood oven. The flexibility means you can choose the cheaper or more convenient fuel for any given session — light the gas for a quick weeknight pizza and save the wood (and the cost and effort) for special occasions when the flavour really counts.

Our Overall Rating by Category

Rather than crown one fuel "the best," I've scored each on the things that matter most. Your priorities decide which score you should weight heaviest — there's no universal winner, only the right winner for you.

What this table really shows is that each fuel excels at something different. Gas tops ease and speed, wood owns flavour and theatre, and hybrids lead on sheer flexibility. None of them is weak — it's a strong category across the board — so the decision comes down to matching the strengths to how you'll actually use it.

Who Should Buy Which?

Let me make this practical. Here's the kind of cook each fuel type suits best, based on everything we've covered.

Frequently Asked Questions