Kevin Hansen
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The wood-burning 70×70 is the flagship pizza oven for Italian pizza oven maker Pizza Party (yes, that’s the name of the company). According to their website, they’ve been working on it since 1998, so it’s been around for quite a while. Pizza Party kindly sent me a unit to review, and like always, I’ll offer you my honest thoughts on this wood-fired behemoth. After you deal with the labor of splitting firewood and getting a good fire going, this Italian-built oven turns into a pizza-making machine.
Unboxing & Design
The oven arrived on a wooden pallet in a large box. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of styrofoam packing in this box, which I’m never a big fan of—but sometimes it’s unavoidable. The oven comes in one big piece that you can lift out of the box with the strings tied around each side of the unit. You will definitely need two strong people to move this oven because it’s heavy. Without the bricks it weighs 77 pounds, and fully loaded it’s roughly 110 pounds. So between the weight and the size, don’t count on moving it by yourself. Speaking of bricks, I received the model with the Biscotto Saputo floor, not the refractory floor, which is the other available option.
Once you get the oven on its table, you can add the brick floor and remove the protective adhesive on the aluminum exterior. Don’t make the mistake I did and wait to do this after your helper leaves because there’s plastic on the bottom of the oven that also needs to be removed. The 70×70 has a large interior designed to cook multiple pizzas at once. However, I only cooked one at a time since I didn’t have a helper to assemble pizza while I tended the cooking.
My biggest criticism of this oven has to do with the documentation (especially through the lens of an English speaker). The instructions aren’t always clear and don’t do a good job of telling you what’s in the box.
Pizza Party’s website has video tutorials showing best practices for using the door and chimney to control the fuel consumption and heat. But these videos are tricky to find as they’re hidden behind a small link at the bottom of the homepage. For a total newbie, the written manual should probably have some bullet points about door usage instead of relying solely on video tutorials. There will be a learning curve if you’ve never done this before.
Getting it Started
To fire up the oven, I purchased a bunch of kiln-dried hardwood: cherry and birch. I started my fire with some fire starter bricks I grabbed at the hardware store. As the fire gets going, you close the door, but prop the door open a bit to allow air flow for the fire. I added extra wood every 15-20 minutes, and the floor of the oven reached over 800 degrees after about an hour and a half. I do have one very minor nitpick–the thin-gauge steel on the door expands when hot, which makes manipulating the air intake a little trickier.
Cooking Neapolitan Pizza
I used my usual 65% hydration poolish dough and stuck to the classic pizza Margherita for this session. There’s a large steel dome inside to keep the flame and heat from going directly toward the chimney and instead keep the flame rolling over the cooking surface. The pizza cooked quickly and didn’t require frantic turning to get nice, even cooking. I didn’t even have to dome the pizza very much to get nice char on the crust. The bricks that come with the oven are heavy and thick, so they retain a ton of heat allowing you to cook pizza after pizza without really needing to wait between each one.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I was very impressed with the oven’s performance once you get it fully heated. The pizza I cooked all turned out great. Also, there’s definitely something romantic about cooking pizza with a crackling wood fire. As an added bonus, since this oven take a long time to cool down, you could try baking some bread in it as the fire dies down. The only thing really holding this oven back is the written documentation, which could definitely use an upgrade. Otherwise, if you’re the type of person who wants to cook pizza the old-school way, the 70×70 is a great way to get to the promised land.
