Fitness / May 8, 2024

I Tested Ooni Karu 16 Pizza Oven and My Pies Rival Pizzerias

Men’s Journal aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission.

The best pizza ovens just keep coming—hit after hit—thanks, in part, to the pandemic’s onslaught of baking bread and home improvement. Americans love pizza and, according to a survey conducted by home pizza oven company Gozney, a third of us eat it at least once a week.

I’m one of those Americans. However, I almost never order takeout, because I’m also one of those Americans who bought a pizza oven during lockdowns and haven’t looked back.

I’d been making OK pizza for a couple decades, but during COVID I bought Ooni Koda 16 and that upped my pizza game to the point where I’d have to drive an hour to get better pizza. Plus, each pie costs me less than $5 to make, despite using premium ingredients.

I’ve tested several other pizza ovens since, but Ooni Karu 16 is the first one that felt like a worthy upgrade. It can burn wood, charcoal, or gas; cooks more evenly; and gets hotter than any other home pizza oven I’ve tried.

For that reason, it reigned supreme in the pizza oven category in this year’s Men’s Journal Grilling Awards. Read more of the greatest hits, including the best charcoal grills, portable grills, pellet grills, gas grills, smokers, grill tools, plus pro tips on how to clean a grill, how to grill a steak, and where to find the best mail-order steaks.

The door on the Karu 16 helps keep the temperature more consistent from the back to the front of the oven.

Justin Park

Ooni Karu 16 First Impressions

Ooni started as a Kickstarter in 2012, providing a ~$500 solution to the shortcomings of traditional ovens. Your average home oven tops out around 450 or 500 degrees F, while the chewy, airy crust of a Neapolitan pie demands 800 to 1,000 degrees. Today, Ooni has a lineup of six distinct ovens in a range of sizes and fuel sources, from electric to gas to wood; but in my opinion, Karu 16 is its best all-arounder.

It addresses all my gripes with Koda. Most notably, it adds a door to the mouth of the oven, which prevents wind and cold air from sucking the heat out of the front of the oven, resulting in more even cooking. The way the oven directs flames over the pizza is also an improvement and I’ve found it less likely to burn crusts while doing a better job of melting cheese and cooking toppings.

But don’t just take it from me: Karu 16 is the only household pizza oven endorsed by the Associazione Vera Pizza Napoletana (a non-profit that certifies what is and isn’t authentic Neapolitan pizza).

Pros: Fuel Flexibility and Consistent Cooking

Home range ovens provide even heat with minor hotspots, but most pizza ovens have a fairly steep temperature gradient: blazing hot up to 1,000 degrees in the back close to the heat source and gradually cooling as you move toward the mouth of the oven. In winter, I’ve measured differences as high as 300 degrees between the back and front of the cooking surface in my Koda 16.

You quickly learn this temperature gradient means that, once the crust has stiffened enough, you need to start rotating the pizza so the less-cooked parts catch up. This is a skill and it’s fun when you get good at it, but too sharp a gradient causes problems. If the rear of the pie is cooking too quickly, but the front hasn’t stiffened up, you won’t be able to rotate the pizza since half of it is still limp. While you’re waiting on the front, the back will carbonize.

Homemade pizza in an Ooni Karu 16 pizza oven cooks consistently evenly.

Justin Park

The glass-faced door on Karu 16 solves this. It keeps cold air out and the oven’s heat in, resulting in a less severe drop-off in temperature as you move toward the front of the oven. (I never measured more than a 120-degree difference between maximum and minimum temperatures inside Karu, though the rear is still the hottest spot.)

The result? The entire crust firms up much more quickly around the whole area of the pie, so you can run the oven at extremely high temperatures and begin turning it quickly, before any section of the pie gets overly charred.

Ooni Karu 16 comes set up to cook with wood, with a gas burner add-on for $119. Given that the price tag is already $799 before accessories, I wish it came with the gas option by default, but it’s worth the extra spend.

The fire box of the Ooni Karu 16 pizza oven takes wood chunks, but you can also switch to gas when in a rush to pump out pies.

Justin Park

I live in a low-oxygen climate at over 10,000 feet in the Rockies, so I was fairly skeptical of cooking with wood at all, but the smart airflow design (similar to a Solo Stove fire pit), aggressively pulls air through the fire box and quickly generates a ton of heat. I tested both the wood fire box and gas burner as fuels; while the burner peaked at 889 degrees, I was able to push the wood-fired heat to 990 degrees—higher than the listed maximum of 950 degrees.

Aside from the higher temps, I also quickly came to appreciate the light smoky flavor added to pies when cooking with wood. At those burn temperatures, there’s not much smoke, but after having eaten hundreds of gas-fired pies, I immediately tasted the difference on the wood-fired pies and have come to prefer it.

Cons: Funky Igniter and Limited Pie Size

The piezoelectric igniter on the gas burner gave me fits and almost never succeeded in lighting the gas despite creating a visible spark. Ooni customer service was kind enough to send me a replacement, but the second unit fared no better and I resorted to lighting it with a stick lighter.

My only other gripe with Karu 16 is a more general caution that applies to any pizza oven in this price range, and that’s the size limitations of these relatively small ovens. Karu 16 maxes out at about a 16-inch diameter pie, and I’m not aware of any sub-$1,000 household pizza ovens with a bigger capacity. (Ooni has announced a new Koda oven that will cook up to 20-inch pies for under $1,000, but it won’t be available for pre-order until May 2024.)

The only real con with the Ooni Karu 16 pizza oven is the finicky igniter.

Justin Park

If you’re used to a large pizza, 16 inches and smaller feels like a medium, which can take some getting used to. If you’re thinking, Who cares? Just make two mediums! it’s more complicated than that. As pies get smaller, the ratio of crust to toppings goes up exponentially. If you’re a Neapolitan traditionalist and live for the crust, you might not mind personal pizzas, but big slice fans will want to push the oven capacity as much as they can.

If you want to recreate big, foldable New York-style slices at home, you might be better off trying to get the most out of your oven. Because those pizzas have a slightly thicker dough and more ingredients on top, they need to cook at lower temperatures—and a properly heated stone in a 500-degree oven can do the trick.I’ve come to love the softer, chewier dough of Neapolitan pizzas, but I think many potential household pizza oven buyers don’t realize these high-temperature pizza ovens such as the Karu 16 are built with Neapolitan—instead of the more familiar New York style—in mind.

Final Verdict

Ooni Karu 16 is the best pizza oven $1,000 can buy. Ooni launched this category of affordable high-temp home pizza ovens and constant innovation has kept the brand on top of it, with Karu 16 representing the pinnacle of its design prowess (so far). The consistent, even cooking and fuel flexibility make it a great choice for novices and pros alike. At roughly $1,000, when you add in the gas burner and essential accessories, such as peels and a cutter, the cost for Karu 16 isn’t cheap, but it’s still half the cost or less of any superior options.

How I Tested Ooni Karu 16 Pizza Oven

I spent about two weeks cooking pizza at home using Ooni Karu 16. I kept my normal pizza-making process exactly the same, using 65 percent hydration homemade dough balls kept in my fridge and allowed to proof at room temperature for at least an hour. Because Karu 16 uses both gas and wood fuel, I tested both back-to-back to compare performance and took temperature readings at various points in the oven using an infrared thermometer and compared that to the readout of Karu’s internal temperature readout.

I cooked about 40 15-inch pizzas in total, varying the oven temperature and techniques to see what yielded the best results and gauge how forgiving the oven is. To compare Karu 16 to other comparable options, I drew on my experience testing other consumer pizza ovens. In particular, I compared it with Ooni Koda 16 and Solo Stove Pi.