Kevin Hansen
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For the last twenty years, Pizza Party has been churning out Italian-made pizza ovens. And earlier I had a chance to review their wood-burning original 70×70 oven. Now, they’ve been kind enough to send me a media sample of one of their gas-fired models, the Ispirazione. Can this massive beast of an oven crank out high-quality Neapolitan-style pizza? Let’s dive in.
Packaging and Design
The oven came to me encased in a solid wood crate. The oven is beautiful with an “antique copper” look on the exterior. Make sure you have an extra set of hands to help you set it up, because with the bricks, the Ispirazione weighs a substantial 95 pounds. The oven is sold with the choice between refractory or biscotto bricks. (Mine arrived with the 3cm-thick biscotto bricks.) The biscotto clay stone helps keep the bottom of your pizza from burning due to its lower coefficient of heat-transfer. It’s perfect for the high-temperature cooking required for Neapolitan pizza. It’s worth noting that I purposely left the legs off the unit to fit on my table here.
How Does it Cook?
The Ispirazione is large, with a cooking floor size of 24 by 28 inches – room enough to cook up to 4 pizzas at once, depending on size. The oven lights easily with the quick ignition button on the back, and the burner generates a large amount of heat. The downside of the burner is that it goes out if you try to turn the heat down much below the full blast. Don’t expect this oven to properly cook a New-York style pizza.
As usual, I made a 65% hydration poolish dough a couple days in advance. Once the oven reached 900 degrees, it was time to cook. The Ispirazione gave me little trouble cooking my pizza at these high temps, needing between 75-90 seconds per pizza. The biscotto flooring prevented the bottom from scorching, which less experienced cooks might experience in other ovens with a cordierite stone. I particularly enjoyed a pizza I made with chorizo, basil, and fresh ricotta. Check out that leoparding, and you can see shots of the under carriage in my video review below.
Final Thoughts
So who is this oven for? If you’re looking for an oven with the versatility to also cook at lower temperatures for other pizza-styles, it might not be the best option for you. However, if you’re the kind of person who loves Neapolitan pizza, then you’d probably enjoy this oven with its authentic Italian-made biscotto stones and aesthetic, especially if you need to cook multiple pizzas at once. The Ispirazione does a fantastic job when it comes to cooking pizza in the style from the birthplace of pizza, Naples, Italy.
