We love a Solo Stove at Snow Magazine, whether the diminutive little Lite camp stove or their backyard warming firepits. They all follow the same sleek stainless steel designs, with highly recognisable embossed Solo Stove logos. Part of the appeal of Solo Stove products is always the look, but over and above simple aesthetics we love their innovative, durable designs.
Our long-time favourite product from this brand is the Bonfire 2.0 firepit. It’s big enough to provide warmth to a small group yet easily small enough to store in a small shed and transport in the boot of your car. You can also cook on it using an optional grill accessory, a function we’ve used many times for backyard burgers.
Although an optional pizza oven accessory is available for their firepits, this feels like a bolt-on, and pizza lovers will want more than a bolt-on. And now they have it with the Pi Pizza Oven.
The Pi is a premium pizza oven designed to give you an authentic pizza taste and experience. Externally the Pi features an impeccably built stainless steel facade with smooth curves and punched holes for ventilation. The mouth of the oven is shaped to allow easy manoeuvring of pizzas into and out of the oven.
Like many Solo Stove products, the Pi is highly functional as a garden piece but is also small and light enough to be portable. This makes it incredibly versatile; take it camping, take it to friends, or keep it in your garden for regular pizza parties. If you’re keeping the Pi outdoors, we highly recommend buying the optional shelter which provides a waterproof cover for your precious pizza oven.
The Pi is available in three main configurations; gas-powered, wood-only, or dual-fuel.
The gas-powered and wood-only versions of the Pi pizza oven are cheaper, but we think getting the dual-fuel version is worth the investment. This gives you the option of convenience when you want to fire up the stove and get cooking quickly on gas, or an authentic wood-fired taste, just with a little more effort.
The gas hook-up on the Pi will be familiar to anyone who barbecues, with a simple regulator and hose designed to be clamped onto a barbed connector. This is intuitive, with the connection taking a few minutes. This does, of course, rely on you having a suitable gas bottle to connect to the Pi. Switching the gas on is just as easy as connection, thanks to a simple adjustable knob with a piezo ignitor.
It only takes a little while for the Pi to come up to temperature using gas, and the consistency of temperature is excellent across the entire cooking time of your pizzas. This makes cooking on the Pi so convenient you might forget about the wood altogether.
The dual-fuel version of the Pi adds a convenient wood-burning assembly that takes kiln-dried cuts. Getting your oven up to temperature using wood as your fuel source, and then maintaining that temperature is of course more work than simply flicking the gas switch, but there’s something very satisfying about cooking on a fire that you’ve made.
Of course, the wood-fired cooking adds another dimension to the taste of the pizzas as well, especially the bases with that signature woody flavour we know and love. The pizzas coming out of the gas-powered Pi are still delicious though; we think that’s partly because of the stone cooking base.
Cooking pizzas in an oven like this is best done with the oven HOT so we recommend getting the optional metal turner. In fact, the bundle is a great idea as it provides you with a load of genuinely useful accessories at a discounted price.
Overall, the Pi Pizza Oven is a great success. It’s another fantastic product from Solo Stove that trumps the competition on aesthetics, portability, functionality, and durability. The taste ain’t half bad either.
