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Piezano Pizza Oven Review: Can It Reach 800 Degrees?

The Piezano Crispy Crust Pizza Oven by Granitestone is a newer pizza oven at a very affordable price. It has top and bottom controls for the heating elements, a clamshell design built around a 12-inch stone, and a glass porthole to view the cooking. The manufacturer claims that it can get up to 800 degrees… but can it really do that at the discount price point?

This oven is a truly budget option (listed by the manufacturer’s website at $129 but can be found for less on Amazon). It’s cheaper than the Chefman oven that we reviewed earlier. And like many things, there are tradeoffs for the reduced price point. Let’s make pizza and get into the nitty gritty.

Unboxing & Design

The Piezano’s packaging is pretty basic. Since it’s such a light oven, roughly eight pounds, it comes packed in a box surrounded by styrofoam and tape. All you need to do is pull it out, put in the pizza stone, and after a brief high temp run to burn off manufacturing residues, you’re ready to make pizza.

The oven includes a metal scraper that you can use to both cut dough and scrape the stone clean after use. It also comes with a circular bamboo wooden peel that is split in half for laying your uncooked pizza on the cooking surface. I was really not a fan of the peel that comes with the oven—I’ll have more to say on that later in this review.

As long as your dough and ingredients are ready, you can literally be making pizza within 20 minutes.

The Piezano Pizza Oven
The Piezano oven with the lid open showing the cooking stone.

The design is different than other ovens I’ve used. It’s a clamshell shape with a heating element both above and below the stone. A quick search online shows a handful of other ovens with a similar design, and perhaps I’ll get around to covering those later.

The oven is very straightforward. It has two analog knobs that are numbered from 0 to 800 with 200 degree increments in between. There’s a thermometer built into the lid, similar to what you’d see on an old school Weber charcoal grill.

Performance

This oven runs at 1200 watts, a good amount less than the Chefman oven. The Chefman runs at 1700 watts and it shows. While the Chefman does a good job of achieving over 800 degrees on the stone, the Piezano was unable to reach those temperatures as advertised on the box.

The Piezano packaging shows a cheese and tomato pizza getting cooked inside of the Piezano oven.
The box claims that the Piezano can heat up to 800° F.

Unlike other indoor ovens I’ve used, the Piezano is very quiet. There are no fans or moving parts. The heat is generated by the two heating coils located above and below the cooking surface.

Below is a chart showing how quickly the stone heats. As you can see, it heats very quickly, but I never saw it achieve temperatures above 730° F. And with how the heating element cycled on and off, most of the time it hovered closer to 700°.

A chart showing the preheat times in the Piezano oven.

I mentioned that the lid has a dial thermometer built into the lid. While the thermometer did show that the air temperature reached 800 degrees, the stone never got close. I don’t have a good way to measure the air temperature myself, but these types of thermometers—the same type that is built into traditional charcoal grills—tend to be pretty unreliable.

New York Style Performance

I made a 65% hydration dough with Bob’s Red Mill bread flour that I had cold fermented in the fridge for a couple days. The whole unit is only about 8 pounds, so as you can imagine, the pizza stone is pretty light weight. The downside is that the temperature of the stone seems to drop pretty quickly when you open the lid and put room temperature dough on it. I decided to cook at the max heat setting for the bottom burner, but decreased the top burner to 600.

The split circle bamboo peel that comes with the Piezano oven
The peel that comes in the box

For my first attempt, I used the bamboo peel that comes with the oven. I’ll just say outright and without mincing words: I hate this peel. It’s awful. Bamboo isn’t the ideal wood for a pizza peel, but it’s inexpensive, so that’s understandable. The problem is the design. You’re intended to place your stretched dough on this peel and use the separate halves to put the pizza gently on the stone. In practice, it’s virtually impossible to pick this peel up from a flat surface without mangling your dough.

My first dough was completely annihilated, and I had to trash it. On my second attempt, I managed to pick up my pizza, but the center of the pizza got stretched almost paper thin, causing it to burn and bubble badly during cooking.

A slightly mangled cheese pizza.

I decided to use a more traditional peel to launch my next pizza on the stone. While it was a little finicky, I very much preferred it to using the stock peel Piezano provides. With the bottom heater on the max setting and the top at around 600, I got a pretty good quality NY style pizza. The browning was decent, but uneven. You definitely need to rotate your pizza when cooking in the Piezano. But other than that, it was crisp and definitely hit the spot.

A cooked pepperoni NY-style pizza on the Piezano oven stone.
My most successful pizza in the Piezano

Neapolitan Performance

For my Neapolitan test, I used a 2-day dough made with a poolish preferment. Since the oven advertises itself as reaching 800 degrees, I thought it was worth giving Neapolitan a try. I cranked both heating elements to the max setting, and let the oven get as hot as possible. I launched the pizza and crossed my fingers.

Straight up, as you might expect, Neapolitan-style pizza does not work in the Piezano at all. The oven doesn’t get hot enough, so with the lower hydration dough, the pizza turns out way too dry by the time it’s gotten browned. At least the cheese looked nice!

A pizza margherita made in the Piezano
My Neapolitan test pizza looked better than it tasted.

Performance Takeaway

So what’s my final verdict on this oven? It’s fine. But it’s not great. At least it’s cheap as far as pizza ovens go. This oven will get you a pretty good, small, New York style pizza. But it can’t do much else. I’d personally rather save up and get an oven with more versatility, such as the outdoor Solo Pi Prime (our #1 ranked budget pizza oven) or one of the better (but unfortunately more expensive) indoor ovens.

But if your budget is really tight and you think you’ll be happy with decent (albeit small) New York style pizzas, then the Piezano is not a bad choice. However, you might be better off buying a pizza steel if you have a home oven with a 550°F broiler. The Piezano definitely gets hotter than 550°F, which is a pro in its favor because I like to cook my New York style above 600°, but I can make larger pizzas in my home oven. And a pizza steel is easier to store. So those are the tradeoffs.

Please consider using the affiliate link below if you decide to purchase the Piezano. I will receive a few bucks of commission to help with purchasing more pizza ovens to review in the future. Thank you!

Sale
PIEZANO Crispy Crust Pizza Oven by Granitestone – 12 Inch Electric Pizza Oven Indoor Countertop…
  • DELICIOUS HOMEMADE PIZZA: Experience the taste of pizzeria-style pies right from home. Bake…
The good.
Very inexpensive compared to other oven models
Lightweight and easy to move and store.
Makes a decent NY-style pizza
The bad.
Doesn't achieve high temperatures consistent with what the marketing promises.
Not powerful enough to make a variety of pizza types.
3.1

Written by Kevin Hansen

Kevin is the Lead Editor for Pala Pizza. He’s been a prolific home cook for over 20 years. Kevin began making pizza in 2019 with a focus on New York style, US Sicilian, and Neapolitan. He graduated from the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.

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