Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My husband and I own a pizza restaurant, and we've been participating in more outdoor festivals. A pizza truck would be ideal for these events, but seeing as those cost $40,000-plus, I thought a portable pizza oven and a nice canopy would be a more cost-effective alternative. Now, there are $3,000 portable pizza ovens, but this is our first year, and I thought something more affordable would be best for our trial run. I read all the reviews for all the ovens. We chose this one because the deck is bigger -- we can fit a 12-inch pizza in there --and it came with the attachments for a larger propane tank. We've done three outdoor events with it so far this year, and here's what we've found: 1. If you're doing a thin cracker-style crust pizza, low to medium heat is best. High heat will scorch the dough. We parbake our crusts at the restaurant, top them with raw ingredients, shrink wrap them then cook them hot on site. When we had the oven temp on high (roughly 600 degrees) the bottoms would burn before the cheese would even melt. So, we crank it up to high to pre-heat, then lower the temp down to about 500 for cooking. This has turned out quality crusts with evenly heated toppings. 2. Rotating the pizza is necessary. The front door doesn't hinge down like I assumed from the picture. Instead there's a removable front door that you set to the side. Because it doesn't close, but rather sets in front of the opening, a lot of heat escapes causing the heat distribution to be fairly uneven. Rotating is an easy solution. I bought the Pizzacraft Pizza Peel with a Folding Handle--it's nice and portable. 3. The deck heat is not the same as oven temp that reads at the top of the oven. I'd suggest a thermal temperature gun to ensure that the stone is the proper heat. 4. It's very light. This is nice. Easy to transport even for one person. 5. We used one large propane tank for three events (and one of them was a two-day event). Impressive. 6. We like to do 12-inch pizzas at our events, and this just barely fits them. You could also do two 10-inch pizzas. 7. Have a deck brush with a scraper on hand in case of cheese spills or cornmeal build up (cornmeal helps the pizzas to slide into the oven). 8. There's a plastic gasket on the bottom of the metal ledge. I assume that it's to protect the ledge from being dented or to keep people from cutting themselves on its sharp edge. Anyhow, it falls off. 9. Overall, it's easy to use. It produces quality pies, even at a high rate (obviously the more often you open the door & let heat out, the longer the next pie will take to bake. Nevertheless, we were still producing pies in about 10 min. even with consistent pie after pie use). I'm sure there's commercial units that cook faster, work better, etc, but for the price, this is an exceptional value and we are glad we purchased it. At our last event, we made 200 pizzas in this oven over the course of 4 hours, and this little unit did a bang up job.