BakerStone Portable Gas Series Pizza Oven Box review

The BakerStone Portable Gas Series Pizza Oven Box pulls double duty: Since it was originally designed as a box to place on a grill, you can actually detach the top portion from the bottom and do your pizza-cooking on a grill. The interior of the oven, composed of five sides of pizza stones, performed surprisingly well when up against the open-flame Ooni Koda 16 and Gozney Roccbox, our two top picks for the best outdoor pizza ovens. Because the five stones maintain and radiate a lot of heat, the pizzas we made in our BakerStone Portable Gas Series Pizza Oven Box review came out with a good amount of char and were cooked evenly.

We also liked that there are two gas burners within the firebox, which each have their own knob, so you can really experiment with the heat of each side of the oven. Gaze into a hole on either side of the firebox, and you can see the flames flickering away, giving a good idea of the heat they’re generating. Plus, an easy-to-read thermometer on top of the pizza box lets you keep an eye on your temperature levels while you’re cooking.

BakerStone Portable Gas Series Pizza Oven Box review: Price and availability

The BakerStone Portable Gas Series Pizza Oven Box costs $349, and is available at Bakerstonebox.com. It first went on sale in March 2020. A kit, which includes the pizza oven as well as a pizza peel and a pizza turner, is also available for $369.

BakerStone Portable Gas Series Pizza Oven Box review: Ease of setup

The BakerStone oven does require a fair amount of assembly. You’ll need a Phillips screwdriver and a pair of scissors to cut zip ties that secure some items. While the bottom portion, or the “firebox” arrives fully assembled — save for a battery that must be inserted into the ignitor and four legs that need to be unfolded — the top “Pizza Oven Box” (the original product launched by the company, which can be taken off and placed onto a grill) must be put together. 

The 10-step instructions, which walk you through assembling the box and securing the five pizza stones within, are pretty easy to follow. Only one step, in which a vent is installed onto the base stone, was unclear. All in all, assembling the pizza oven box took around 15 minutes and didn’t require a high level of mechanical knowledge. Once the pizza oven box is placed on the base, you’re ready to cook. Pro tip: You’ll find that there are a lot of screws and washers to remove and then re-attach, so having a cup nearby to hold them isn’t a bad idea.

Once set up and on a tabletop, to get the oven running, you simply hook the gas regulator — already attached to the firebox — up to a propane tank. Once it’s secured and tightened, the BakerStone manual recommends that the gas connection should be tested with a soapy water solution to ensure there are no leaks. We did so, and found no leaks.

Igniting the BakerStone requires starting each burner separately by turning the burner to high while pressing and holding the ignition button. Both lit up quickly, and while we do like the double-burner function, a single ignition would have been easier. The oven heated up to 700 degrees in about 20 minutes, about the same amount of time it took the Ooni Koda 16 and Gozney Roccbox.

BakerStone Portable Gas Series Pizza Oven Box review: Design and functionality

The design of the BakerStone pizza oven is more function-forward than design-minded, but we appreciate its simplicity. The pizza oven box simply rests atop the firebox base. Although this may not seem very stable, it didn’t move around during cooking, and not attaching it makes for easy removal if you’d like to use the pizza box on a grill.

The knobs on the front of the oven that control the two burners allow you to play with heat levels, and a built-in thermometer on top of the oven keeps track, generally, of temperature. The thermometer is divided into cooking three ranges; it would be more helpful to have an actual numerical reading as on the Gozney Roccbox (we used a laser thermometer to closely keep track of temperature). You can actually peek in two holes on each side of the oven to see the level of the burners’ flames, which also helps to regulate the temperature.

When cooking, it’s important to keep in mind that the opening of the oven is narrow (at only a little over three inches), so it’s best to pay close attention when inserting and removing pizzas, as the exterior gets very hot. The narrow opening and compact cooking area did a great job of retaining heat between the oven’s five pizza stones (one on each side), though.

BakerStone Portable Gas Series Pizza Oven Box review: Cooking performance

Given that there isn’t an exposed flame, we were skeptical that the BakerStone would get hot enough to cook thin-crust pizzas quickly — but we were wrong! Having stones on each side meant that the oven trapped a lot of heat inside. As with most of the other models, the BakerStone is the hottest at the back of the oven, so cooking closer to the rear is recommended for the quickest turnaround time.

In our tests, fresh dough made by hand and by a local pizzeria cooked in about four minutes, coming out with a nice, puffy crust, and with just as much charring on the crust as the open-flame versions. Store-bought dough (both refrigerated and frozen/thawed) burned on the outside but remained chewy and somewhat uncooked on the inside — a cooking issue with all of the ovens we tried, not just the BakerStone. Overall, the pizzas were just as good as those we made with the Ooni and Roccbox, although they took a few more minutes to finish.

BakerStone Portable Gas Series Pizza Oven Box review: Verdict

The BakerStone is a versatile oven that, truthfully, performed much better than expected given its lack of an exposed flame. The Ooni and Roccbox, with their open flames, cooked pizzas faster and were easier to control, which is why we preferred them over the BakerStone. Plus, neither of those grills required more than a step or two of assembly. Still, grilling fanatics will love how easy it is to remove the BakerStone’s Pizza Oven Box and place it on a grill to give pizzas a smokier flavor.