Kevin Hansen
I snagged the electric Gourmia Pizzeria Indoor Pizza Oven when it became available at Walmart in December of 2024. There are other versions of the Gourmia that offer additional features such as air frying, convection, and broiling. However, the version I got is designed primarily for making pizza. So my review will focus purely on how the Gourmia performs as a pizza oven.
Unboxing & Design
Unboxing the Gourmia is easy. It’s pretty much like unboxing a microwave. All you have to do is get it unpacked from the styrofoam, remove some tape holding things together, and put the pizza stone in. All assembled, it’s pretty light, weighing just above 20 pounds. The cooking stone is approximately 12.5″x12.5″, so you won’t be cooking pizza any larger than 12 inches in diameter. The oven has relatively simple controls with presets for a few types of pizza, but more importantly, it has manual controls to set the top and bottom heating elements separately.
How Does the Heating Perform?
The Gourmia claims to cook at up to 800° Fahrenheit. The highest temperature I clocked with the infrared thermometer was 783°F. This temperature was reached after setting the oven to the maximum settings; the Gourmia completed its preheat cycle in roughly 20 minutes. As I mentioned before, the oven is light which means that the pizza stone isn’t very thick. It’s a quarter of an inch thick, so you do need to allow time for the stone to reheat. The version of the Gourmia I have doesn’t tell you when the oven has come back up to temperature. So you need to wait a few minutes, or have a thermometer to check for yourself.
Performance
Generally speaking, the Gourmia performs very well. As usual, I tried cooking both Neapolitan and New York style. For Neapolitan pizza, I made a 30% poolish dough at roughly 65% hydration using double-zero type flour. As you can see in the pictures, the oven does achieve some nice char, but it’s not quite capable of producing the super high quality leoparding that some people might hope for.
For the New York style pizza, I made a 62% hydration dough with bread flour that was cold proofed for 48 hours. I put it in the Gourmia with the bottom temperature around 625 degrees and the top temperature at 600 degrees. Since it’s an indoor pizza oven, you’re not intended to rotate the pizza as it cooks. The oven churned out some nicely browned pizzas that my family enjoyed. I made a few different pizzas, and for the most part the results were consistent.
Final Thoughts
My main complaint about the Gourmia is the controls. As stated earlier, you have to guess if the oven has re-heated enough for a new pizza after cooking your previous one unless you use your own thermometer. The oven doesn’t give you audio feedback when you’re pressing buttons either, which some people might not like. They’re also a little finicky on how responsive they feel when pushing them.
Another problem is that the oven turns off on its own even when you’re cooking without the timer set. This happened to me unexpectedly when I was cooking several pizzas. The Gourmia makes no sound to notify you that it has turned itself off. It’s a little annoying when you finish assembling a new pizza only to discover that you can’t launch it yet because you have to turn the oven back on and wait for it to preheat again.
Ultimately though, these complaints are relatively minor when you consider that the Gourmia is a budget product. When it comes down to it, the Gourmia is capable of cooking high quality pizza, though only at a maximum size of 12 inches.
