bella PRO - Blaze Pizza Oven+ - Stainless Steel

This thing works really well, still working on my dough recipe, but good product.

The bella PRO - Blaze Pizza Oven+ seemed like an irresistible invitation to elevate my home pizza making. I’m sticking with my justification for eating so much pizza with the “it’s the whole food pyramid on one plate” excuse. You’ll find your own excuse, I’m sure. We’ve become acceptable dough makers but we are very skilled at finding so many prepared, but uncooked, pizza varieties using fresh doughs, frozen doughs and even on cauliflower crusts or gluten-free crusts. We’re testing our hypothesis that we’ve needed an oven that achieves genuine pizza oven temperatures to get those perfect crusts. These early results are looking good. USAGE and PERFORMANCE: The Blaze Oven has only the two controls. Plugging it in and a tone lets you know it’s ready for use. (This is also why you want to unplug it when not in use.) Make sure the stone is centered on its heating element (made easier by the slight depression). Set your temperature and press to initiate preheating. The TIMER does not work until after the preheat period. After the pre-heat period it seems like you have 10 minutes to insert pizza and set its cooking time. Temperature Test with Infrared instrument: I read temperatures off of the stone that were remarkably close to the dial temp reading. I measured 477 degrees with the oven set at 450 degrees. BUT, I need to point out that my initial readings, after opening the door several times to acquire my readings showed why opening the door too frequently is a bad idea. I was reading below 400 degrees, and I needed to delay placing my pizza for a few more minutes until the desired temperature was reached. (I could only read off of the front fraction of the stone, the area most likely to be cooled off when opening the door.) Our limited experience with the Blaze suggests you should delay your cooking session for at least a few minutes to allow the oven temperature to fully distribute and stabilize. You can end early by pressing the TIMER. Otherwise allow the oven to count down to zero at which time a series of tones are played and END is displayed. How did our Pizzas come out? We tried several pizzas over several days. I have no choice but to try Gluten Free Pizzas. My cauliflower crust pizza sat too close to the rear wall and slightly browned at that far edge. But in every other way the pizza was quite nicely crisped top and bottom while the cheese stayed gooey but cooked. My wife’s traditional frozen pizza on this day was better centered on the stone and it resulted in an even cook that brought out the best in what was probably a pretty generic pepperoni pizza. A real deal, home-made pizza, fully exploited the intense, higher temperatures this oven can produce. It makes a difference. The bella Pro Blaze Pizza oven is a very practical cooking tool. We’ve looked at similar ovens but found their very specific fuel requirements, the likely fumes that must be carefully controlled, and the effort to properly locate them was too much trouble. For us, the simple demand of an electrical outlet and keeping the size of our pizza or other food choice down to 12” is really easy to accomplish and the finished product is delightful. We recommend the bella Blaze Pizza oven.

I have an outdoor propane/wood pizza oven now, so I've been practicing. But to be honest my outdoor oven is more than a little painful to set up and use. First to get it "up to temp" it takes about 15 minutes. In addition, getting a pizza peel in and out of it is quite difficult. This Bella Pro is electric and intended to be used outdoors. Because it uses forced air because of this my wife was quite worried it would be as loud as our convection oven. Once I unpacked and turned on here fears were allayed. The Bella Pro runs very quietly. The instructions that come with it easily get it set up and running (it weighs about 35 lbs). There are no recipes in the included book (disappointing). It comes in a very attractive Oatmilk color which is fingerprint resistant. I found it took a little over 4 minutes to preheat to 400 degrees, and about 8 to get to 750 degrees. When you first use it they recommend heating it up to 750 for 15 to remove any "build" residue. After 10 min I detected a "burnt" smell that quickly went away. The oven comes with a pizza peel which you really do need to get a flat pizza in and out fairly quickly. My first time cooking, I found the back of the oven was somewhat hotter than the front, meaning that the back crust may burn if the pizza is not turned. This is essentially that same issue I have on my outdoor oven, so this was not unexpected. I find cooking the pizza for about 60% of the cooking time, then turning it 180 degrees for the remaining 40% gives me an evenly baked crust. My second pizza was more evenly cooked using this technique. To my surprise the exterior of the oven stays fairly cool, except for the edges by the front door which gets a bit warmer. As I said, it runs very quietly. You can set the timer up to 30 minutes. When running the timer and temperature alternate on the display. When finished it says End. I can also see using the oven to make pies, but the timer can't be set as long as I'd like. The timer cannot be set until the oven is preheated. I was thinking that I could bake cornbread and cookies in the oven but I was afraid that they would burn on the stone. I think that I could do so by adding a 1" rack to the bottom, come to think about it, I think it should come with such a rack, it would make it more of a multi-tasker. Overall I'm pleased with it, it looks very nice, heats up quickly, the exterior stays cool and it cooks a pizza nearly perfectly. I do wish the timer went beyond 30 minutes and that it came with some oven tested recipes, especially for pizza dough.

I'm a bit mixed on how to rate this pizza oven, and full disclosure, it's the first pizza oven I've used. I'd overall rate this in the 3.5-4 range. I leaned towards the 4 because it really did make great pizza despite the drawbacks, and I'm excited to continue using it. Here's are the main drawbacks that prevent a full 5/5 rating: - The only significant complaint is the back of the oven gets hotter than the rest of the oven, so while the rest of the pizza cooks evenly, if you don't rotate the pizza, the back of the pizza will burn, or at least be more thoroughly cooked than the rest of the pizza. While slightly burnt, it wasn't to the point of not wanting to eat the pizza, and it was still delicious. - The pizza peel (a new word I learned that refers to the big shovel used to insert and remove the pizza from the oven) is not quite as sturdy as I would like it to be. It seems the weight of the pizza has already caused it to bend ever so slightly, and while it's perfectly fine now, I'm concerned that after months of use, it may need to be replaced. Other things to be mindful of: - It's fairly bulky as far as countertop appliances go, though not excessively so for a pizza oven. Make sure you have somewhere to use and store it. - It can cook pizzas up to 12", which is a reasonable size, but smaller than I expected. I ended up ordering a Take and Bake pizza that was a 12" medium, and it just slightly overlapped the pizza stone in the oven. Here's what's great: - Despite the slight burning of the crust in the back of the oven, it made a great pizza and did so quickly. I used it for 2 small, make-your-own, Bobolli style pizzas the first day, and a Take and Bake pizza the second day. I cranked the oven up to 750 for the first pizzas, and they were done in <3 minutes, which was really awesome. - It's easy to use. There are only 2 knobs, one for temperature, and one for a timer, so there's nothing to really fuss with. It goes through a preheat cycle that can take up to 20 minutes according to the setup manual, but that's for 750 degrees, and it's shorter for lower temperatures. Given we're looking at a countertop pizza oven, I'd still recommend this despite the rear getting hotter than the rest of the oven. I think that's a fairly common issue, and even in professional kitchens, I see chefs turning the pizza halfway through when cooking using their large commercial pizza oven. The first day, we cooked one pizza in the regular oven, and 2 in this pizza oven to compare, and the pizza oven pizzas definitely turned out better. Being able to crank out a pizza in 2-3 minutes at 750 degrees is awesome, and it melted the cheese and cooked everything well.

I really wanted to like this oven but honestly it’s been a steep learning curve this week. It didn’t come with any recipe booklet. It came with instructions on how it works but not how to use it if that makes sense. So I’d like to share my experience with you to try to help you should you decide to buy this pizza oven. First off, upon unboxing, the oven looks great. The oatmilk color has a matte finish and does not show fingerprints. The inside appears to be stainless steel and has a recess to hold the provided pizza stone. There is a heating element below the stone and another above at the top of the cooking chamber. The controls are simple. The left knob you press once to turn it on, rotate to set the temperature, then press again to begin. The right knob you press to set the timer, rotate to set the time in 30 second increments up to a maximum of 30 minutes, then press again to begin the countdown. It includes a pizza peel to launch and retrieve your pizza. There are a couple items it does not come with that I would suggest you have handy. A small flashlight and a non contact infrared thermometer. The flashlight is because this oven has no built in light and it’s helpful to see the food at the back of the oven since it cooks significantly faster back there and you’ll need to rotate your food at the appropriate time. The less you open the door the better so use the flashlight to peek through the window. The thermometer I recommend because the stone’s mass makes it heat up slower than the air in the oven and you’ll want to wait until the stone comes to temp before you begin cooking. I’ll give you an example- When I first received this oven I picked up three frozen pizzas. We eat these all the time and we prepare them on a twentysomething year old pizza stone in a regular oven. They cook in 20 minutes at 400 degrees every time. So for the first test, I set this pizza oven to 400 degrees and let it preheat. It reached 400 degrees in just over five minutes so I slid the pizza in and let it cook. I did not rotate the pizza on purpose so I could see how evenly it cooked. I pulled it out after twenty minutes, the toppings and crust at the back of the oven were getting dark but the cheese at the front hadn’t browned. The crust was not cooked nearly enough and was doughy. Ok, so that’s when I went to get my infrared thermometer. I let the oven cool, then set it for 400 degrees again. When it signaled it was ready, I let it run another ten minutes then checked the temp of the stone. It was only at 235 degrees. Too cold. I ended up letting it run another 20 minutes to get the stone to 380 degrees before I put in pizza #2. I let the second pizza bake for 10 minutes and then turned it around and let it bake another 10 minutes. Came out more evenly baked on top but the crust did not crisp up, I could still bend it without it cracking. Still too cold? The next night I tried more heat. I set the oven to 600 degrees and let it preheat until the stone reached 592 degrees. That’s about 15 minutes after the oven signaled that the air temp was at 600 degrees. I slid the pizza in and let it run just FOUR minutes, I rotated it and let it run just one more minute then pulled it out. Crust was mostly better, not perfect yet. It burned the back edge after four minutes at the higher temp. Bottom of the crust looked much better so next time I will try the same temp but rotate it sooner so it doesn’t blacken the edge of the crust. Ok, on to Sunday morning breakfast. Taking what I learned so far, I tried making a batch of cinnamon rolls. I set the oven to 450 degrees, 100 degrees hotter than what the recipe called for and let the stone reach 400 degrees. I placed the pan of rolls in the center of the stone, closed the door, and then turned the oven off and then back on and set the temp to 350 (the temp the recipe called for). My rationale was that the warmer stone would help cook the bottom better and by having the stone hotter the top heat element might stay off a bit longer and not scorch the top of the rolls. I let them bake for five minutes, rotated them, then baked five more minutes. To my delight, they actually came out darn near perfect! So I think that’s the secret of using this oven. You have to get the stone hot first no matter what the oven’s air temp sensor says. Definitely recommend picking up even a cheap infrared thermometer. For Sunday night dessert, my wife found a recipe for a dessert pizza she wanted to try. She made it with fresh dough, yellow cake mix, chocolate chips, and light brown sugar. Par baked the crust, then added the toppings. Baked five minutes and rotated it. It was supposed to bake five more minutes but at two minutes I saw a wisp of smoke. Dang, the chocolate burned! I did not run the temperature of the stone up higher and then dial the air temp back down like I did for the cinnamon rolls and I think that’s why this failed. The crust wasn’t fully done on the bottom. It needed a hotter stone also I think. So learn from my mistakes and get that stone maybe even 100 degrees hotter than your recipe calls for and then dial back the temp to bake your dish.

I finally got my hands on a Pizza Oven, the Bella Pro Blaze Pizza Oven+, and overall, I am satisfied with the results despite some caveats. I’ve been using it mainly for baking Pizza, since that was my primary intention, and now we can taste Pizzas the way we want them, try different recipes, use different doughs, cook at different temperatures (I like my Pizza crispy) and configure baking times. You could do that with other countertop ovens, but this oven reaches temperatures of 750°F, and its Pizza stone definitely gives the Pizzas and other foods that special touch and taste that cannot be obtained with other baking techniques. I highly recommend reading the Instruction Manual that comes with the device (it can also be downloaded from the web), as it contains succinct yet very useful information on safeguards, what to do before using it, hints on what you can cook among others. I am not the one that reads manuals for the most part, but given the characteristics of this device, I found the Instruction Manual very insightful. Be aware, this is a countertop Pizza oven, it is compact, so don’t expect it to cook big pizzas. You’ll clearly see this everywhere, but just be aware the max recommended pizza size is 12”, I’d say a little even less than that so that cheese or ingredients don’t fall to the sides. - Pros: compact, light, high temperature, pizza stone, viewing window. - Cons: somewhat uneven cooking. >> Operation << The Bella Pro Pizza Oven+ is easy to operate, one knob for the temperature and another for the time, with the Pizza Peel to get your stuff in and out of the oven. However, with maximum temperatures of 750F, I’d recommend referring to the Instructions Manual to learn more details on how to operate the device, I found it >> Before first use << It is recommended to clean and do an initial 15-minute empty-baking at 750° F to get rid of any packing residue. And that is what I did after assembling the Pizza Peel and after washing and drying the Stone and Peel. It took me about half an hour to prepare the Oven for first use. About 15 minutes were spent to Pre Heat the Oven to reach 750° F, I thought that was too much time until I later noticed that the Instructions Manual mentioned the Oven could take up to 20 min to pre-heat to the desired temperature (750° F is the Max temperature as I can tell.) After the Pre Heat, I left the device cooking empty for 15 minutes. During that time, there was a lot of white smoke coming out of the device, with a somewhat overwhelming smell to plastic/synthetic material burnt. After the 15 min elapsed, I opened the door for the odor to dissipate. I still could sense some synthetic material smell after some time, but that smell went away after I cooked the first pizza. >> First Pizzas << From using other compact cooking devices, I had the suspicion that the back area of the oven would cook faster than the front area, and I was not mistaken, the first Cheese Pizza I baked came with the back section more cooked than the front. This wouldn’t have been an issue if not for the back section of my Cheese Pizza coming out almost burnt (well, even those burnt pieces were delicious.) I like my Cheese Pizza crispy and well done, so I programmed the temperature and time to that effect, and I also made sure by looking through the viewing window that the front section of the pizza looked the way I wanted, but I made the mistake of not peeking or using a flashlight to see the back section of the pizza to notice that it was getting overcooked. This uneven cooking is one thing that bothers me. What I am doing now is opening the oven midway cooking and with the Pizza Peel, rotate the Pizza 180°, and continue. Having more than one food inside is a little problematic too, for example, for my quesadillas, if I place three in the oven, then I’d need to open and rotate them, otherwise, the one in the back gets burnt. Now, if you don’t need to have the pizza crispy and well done, then, you can program for a shorter baking time, with the only risk of having the back section come a little overcooked (but not burnt.) Perhaps one can live with this, as opposed to opening the oven and rotating the pizza or the foods inside in the middle of the baking process. >> Quesadillas and Calzones << Placing multiple elements in the oven doesn’t seem practical unless you rotate them midway cooking or a few times while cooking, otherwise the elements or foods in the back could get burnt. That is what happened to me when I cooked some quesadillas, the one to the back got burnt while the ones to the front didn’t. Well, I had the experience of the pizzas, but since the cooking time for the quesadillas was shorter, I thought that all would be good. Well, it was not, I “forgot” that the tortillas are very thin, and the top section of the quesadilla can get easily burnt. If you don’t see it convenient to move things around in the middle of the cooking process, or if you are only cooking for yourself, then one big quesadilla or one big calzone placed close to the front of the oven for sure will come out perfectly cooked, but then you are not making good use of the space. >> Other notes << - Although it says not to put any plastic mat or similar between the device and your countertop or table as the temperatures can get pretty high, I see that the heat at the bottom exterior of the device was not hot at all when reaching 750° F. This was impressive, surprisingly the "insulation" seems pretty top notch. - There is vapor coming out of the device, so it is a good idea to place the Oven near a well-ventilated area. - While cooking the indicator goes from Temperature to Time, so it is very useful to know at what temp you are cooking and how long it is remaining. - You can change the cooking reaming time but not the temperature while the oven is in operation.

The bella Pro Blaze Pizza Oven is fun and frustrating all at the same time. The oven itself is well made. It is relatively heavy and pretty well insulated, although the outside will get hot with extended use. You need to exercise caution when using, and keep small hands away. Operation is simple. Plug it in, and there are two dials. One for temp and one for time. You set the temp, let it preheat, and then add you food and set the timer. I think it has an auto shut off after 10 minutes if you get distracted and haven’t added your food. You can’t change the temp while cooking, so keep that in mind. It’s not a big deal, you just have to cancel the cook and reset the temp and time if you need to change the temp. You can add cook time if needed. Actually using it definitely has a learning curve. It’s essentially a small oven, so you can use it for just about anything even though it has pizza in the name. Just make sure you bakeware can handle whatever temperature you use. I’ve only used mine for pizza. I was disappointed that it didn’t come with any type of recipe book in the box. I’m having to figure out how to make a good pizza on my own through web searches and trial and error. I’m having trouble with my pizzas sticking to the peel and not wanting to slide off onto the preheated stone. I’m not quite sure how to solve that problem…maybe cornmeal? So far, I’ve found that my best option is to use my high temp meat smoking gloves and just pull the pre-heated stone out. Here is my process. Preheat, pull the stone, put the crust on the stone, pre-bake the crust for a full 5 minutes, pull the stone again, add toppings, and bake an additional 10 minutes. The Peel works great for taking it out of the oven. This is with a medium thickness crust. I completely understand that my ability to make a good pizza isn’t necessarily a function of this oven, but without any tips or tricks, I find it equally frustrating and fun. I think it would be fun for a backyard pizza party as a novel theme, but I’m not sure I’m really going to pull it out too often just to cook a pizza. I do think I’ll use it as an auxiliary oven around the holidays. It’s big, but not as big as I thought it might be. Make sure you have someplace you can store it when not in use. You have to clean it up or it will smoke on you when pre-heating. I find that crumbs end up off the stone when I use the peel to remove the pizza. Then I have to let it cool and try to wipe it all down after the fact. The crumbs get down under the bottom element and you have to do a little work to get them out. There isn’t a lot of room for hands and elbows in there. Not terrible, but I wouldn’t call it “easy”. Overall, I’m kind of underwhelmed. I had romanticized making pizza in an cool little oven, but if I’m being honest, it’s just as easy in my regular oven. Considering this isn’t wood fired, you don’t really get an improved flavor. It’s fun as a novelty, but I don’t find it superior to my normal oven. Perhaps if I learn how to make pizza at 700 degrees I’ll think differently, but since they didn’t tell me how to do that, I haven’t figure it out yet.

Since this is my first experience with a stone pizza oven, I was not sure what to expect, but I surely did not think it would produce the type of pizza that you’d get in a good pizza restaurant. But to my surprise, the pizza it made was better than any that I’d had recently. It was nice and crispy including the bottom which is probably because of the stone since I was never able to make a pizza that was crispy in the bottom like this. The closest thing to it was one that I ate in Milan, Italy many years ago. Of course, I have to give some credit to my wife who is a great cook and prepared the dough for three different types of pizza and they all came out wonderful. But we all agreed that the oven was the key ingredient to the taste and texture since she made the same recipes in a regular kitchen oven before and they never tasted this good. The only kind of failure was when we tried to make a Napolitan one. It came out okay but not quite what we expected. We believe that even the highest temperature this one can get to may not be enough for this type of pizza. But I’m not complaining. We just were so impressed that we thought it would make anything and well. It almost does and for the type we usually eat, this is beyond our wildest dreams. We had some friends over just to try it and they were equally impressed. The comments were similar to what we had experienced. They all said that it was better than any pizza place in town and some said it was even beyond that. Again, some credit goes to my wife, but to think that you can have such a great oven in your kitchen is almost too good to be true. It does take up some space but not much more than an average microwave oven. The only issue we had was when we tried it for the first time. It burned the crust closest to the back of the oven. After that, we would rotate the pizza after about half the remaining time we set, and it didn’t happen anymore. We are going to try a few other things as it is a bit inconvenient to do that for every pizza. I honestly don’t think anybody would disagree that it is an excellent oven. You can’t make more than one pizza at a time, but after pre-heating you can have about 3 pizzas in 30 minutes or less depending on how crispy you want. And it is so easy and intuitive to use.

We usually make pizza at home either in the oven, or on a pizza oven that sits on top of our BBQ. The BBQ pizzas are much better than the oven mainly because it gets much hotter between - 600 and 700 degrees and it heats from all sides. So you get a great crust and your pepperoni gets nice and crisp on top too. This is the key to great pizza at home in my opinion. We can really only do the BBQ pizzas in the summer, in the winter it is impossible to get the pizza oven upto to temp and keep it there. So this countertop oven should make it possible to get great pizza all year round! Now, for the Bella Blaze. It is very simple to use with only 2 controls, temp and timer. The timer doesn't work until it preheats. And it gets upto nice high temperatures so you can cook your pizza fast, still have a nice crispy crust and have your toppings cooked/crisped nicely as well. As with most pizza ovens, I think turning the pizza 180 degrees about 1/2 way through the cooking time is a good idea to even out any issues with uneven temperatures. When you're heating to such a high temp, it isn't easy to keep that temp even in the whole oven. Other nice things about the unit is that it is quiet and the outside does not get hot, so you don't have to worry about burning yourself until you open the door. The included pizza peel is essential for putting pizzas in and taking them out and turning the pizza during the cooking time. Some flour/semolina on the peel will make your pizzas slide on and off more easily as well if that is an issue. Overall, very happy with this, I doubt I will be making pizza in my oven any more!