What Can You Cook In A Pizza Oven? (2023)

If you are a pizza fanatic, you may have recently joined the hype train for pizza ovens. Recent technology has led them to be engineered for much cheaper and have become more accessible for the modern home.

Whether you have a standalone pizza oven like a Gozney or Ooni, or you are lucky enough to own a stone, wood fired pizza oven, there are plenty of other treats to make in the pizza oven.

If you do own a pizza oven, you may want to get the most out of it but may be a bit sick of pizza at this point. If you are looking for other ways to get use out of your pizza oven keep reading to learn some new ideas.

How Does A Pizza Oven Actually Work?

Without getting into the specific details, a

The heat on these three walls is particularly strong, however, to account for the loss of heat from the open hole. You can still reach high temperatures inside a pizza oven! The reason we mention this is because, well, you can cook anything you want in a pizza oven that requires cooking.

A pizza oven works via heat at the end of the day, so even if you used a frying pan in there it would still theoretically work, whether you put a dutch oven in there with a lid, or boiled some potatoes, a simple understanding of heat allows you to cook whatever you want in there.

Recipes To Cook In Pizza Oven

We love these alternative recipes you can cook in the pizza oven.

Easy No-Knead Focaccia

If you love pizza and haven’t tried Focaccia, this is your chance. Focaccia is like a naked pizza, with a slightly different dough that is very aerated and crunchy, somewhere in between a ciabatta loaf and Neapolitan pizza dough.

Plus, this specific recipe is shockingly easy, not requiring any kneading at all. It’s an Italian classic recipe that is ideal to make in a pizza oven. It’s great to have certain dips and the ideal dipping accompaniment for soup in winter. Give it a try today, you won’t regret it.

Fire Roasted Chicken

We bet you didn’t think you could cook chicken in the pizza oven, but why not? This whole chicken recipe shows you how to do it directly in the pizza oven, without any uncooked bits. It’s ideal for an easy barbeque, whack this in the oven and let it go and then you have chicken sandwiches to serve a whole host of people happily.

Scalloped Potatoes (Potato Dauphinoise)

This is a potato side dish that can be ideal for the pizza oven. It’s really easy to assemble, just be careful cutting your potatoes. We love making scalloped potatoes but they can often take a long time, the high heat and flames of the pizza oven can cook this pretty quickly and with efficiency.

The way the flames can lick up to the top of the oven and catch the exposed potatoes on top is truly a wonderful thing a convection oven can’t really achieve.

Cinnamon Rolls

We bet you never realized that desserts are not off limits with the pizza oven. Things like cinnamon rolls are great to cook in the pizza oven,, with the extra heat helping them rise quickly, and even getting some gnarly bits where the sugar has caramelized as a result of the flames.

This cinnamon rolls recipe is great and a fun way to use that pizza oven, with most normal ovens not having the power to cook cinnamon buns like this, without waiting a lifetime.

Roast Vegetables

One thing that pizza ovens are great for is for roasting vegetables. If you have an induction hob that doesn’t actually have flames like a gas hob, then the pizza oven is a great way for you to roast vegetables like you could on a gas burner or barbeque.

The heat of the pizza oven is certainly enough to get a nice charred appearance on the vegetables, which is what brings out the flavors so well. Cooking vegetables in the pizza oven is a great way to prepare pizza toppings before using the pizza oven to cook the pizza.

Fresh Berry Dessert Pizza

Italians look away! While dessert pizza sounds a little crazy and maybe isn’t something you like the idea of, if you have a pizza oven, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t give it a go! This fresh berry dessert pizza is a great recipe, specifically engineered for the pizza oven, and is super tasty and classy and not trashy at all.

Naan Bread (Indian Flatbread)

If you love curry, why not change your pizza oven into a tandoor and use it to cook fresh naan bread. If you don’t already know, naan is a type of Indian flatbread commonly served alongside a curry, the perfect bread to soak up your curry sauce!

Naan never comes out the same when you do them in an oven or a saucepan but in the pizza oven they are just like what you get in your takeaway.

Stuffed Peppers

Stuffed peppers are another great dish to cook in the pizza oven. The way the pizza oven roasts the peppers while they are in the oven makes them charred and tasty in a way that the conventional oven can’t - the recipe linked is for pizza stuffed peppers, ideal for a gluten free meal.

Final Thoughts

As you can see, the amount of dishes you can cook in the pizza oven is pretty wide. From breakfast to dessert, the pizza oven is simply another source of heat to cook anything that requires cooking.

That said, the actual flames of the pizza oven can be ideal for certain foods that benefit from that charred flavor a pizza oven can bring, as well as roasting vegetables.

Learning how to use your pizza oven is key to success here. You can cook a wide variety of items on an Ooni pizza oven, or any other pizza oven.