We have the Ooni oven in Cathedral City, and so we only use it when we are there. When we are there (usually for about four weeks at a time), we make pizza twice a week. I do all the prep work and my brother cooks it. We are using the round pizza turning peel, but we also discovered that we need spinners as well, but they are inexpensive. We use the turning peel for the first turn and then use the spinners, as in this video that we made: (You can notice our Texas accents in this video.) The spinners will not work for the first spin, as the pizza will not be firm enough and would distort if you use the spinners too soon. The turning peel is too slow to use after the first turn because the pizza cooks in seconds, and the heat is concentrated in one back corner - thus the need for constant spinning. Here's a photo of a cover I made for the oven using Sunbrella fabric: We get sandstorms in Cathedral City, and so this helps protect the oven. I will add that I tend to make 12" to 13" diameter pizzas and make a batch of dough for two pizzas ad a time. Between the two of us, we eat 1-1/2 pizzas and so have half of a pizza left over, which is fine, and we usually eat that the next morning.

The spinners are good to have, and you can see me using them in the video in which the pizza came out the way it should. I have another video that shows me trying to use the spinners too soon, which should be avoided because the dough has to be cooked sufficiently before spinning the pizza. The spinners are easier to use and more efficient once the dough has cooked enough, but for me, the first turn needs to be done with a turner. If you do not have a turner, you can remove the pizza after 15 seconds using the peel and then turn it on the peel, but it's very difficult to use the peel as a turner without removing the pizza. I know you weren't laughing at me, but for me, the video is painful to watch. I have another video that shows what happens when you try to use the spinners after 10 seconds (another mistake), and so that one might appear funny to others, although not to me. I'll see about uploading it later, as it does have some good information. I don't care if people laugh at my videos - I'm used to it by now. It's just that it is never my intention to make funny videos. However, I've looked at some of my videos later and did find some of them funny. Sometimes I seem to say things without really thinking, and then I wonder later what possessed me to say them. I'm pretty good at ad libbing and can be very spontaneous, but that can be dangerous also. A lot of times I catch people off-guard when I say things that even I don't know why I say. Most of the time I try to control myself, but some people are amused when I don't. I don't know if I mentioned this before or not, but I was in a short independent movie that a friend of mine in Hollywood wrote and directed, and he also did the video editing. He's done video editing for Blind Date, The Robin Leach Show, and many others, and so he's quite good at editing. Anyway, he was using my house in Venice for a location shoot and happened to ask me if I wanted to be in the movie, as he wanted to flesh it out a bit and had decided to add another character, which I was to play. I said okay, but was never given a script, and so I had to ad lib my lines in front of the camera, which took a little bit of getting used to. The movie was a mystery/crime story and therefore not meant to be funny, and so I tried to play my part very seriously. However, when the movie was shown on the big screen to an audience in Hollywood, everyone laughed when I was on screen. I found out later that I was the comic relief, although no one told me that before. After the movie was over, there was a reception in a patio behind the theater, and I got to meet people from the audience who told me that they loved my performance and wanted to know if I had been in anything else. At least they liked me, even though they thought I was funny. P.S. I fixed the link so that it does not take you to Seattle.

What we learned is that there is a lot of art and science to good pizza and bread ovens and it's easy to get wrong. A good pellet grill like Twin Eagles or MAK (stay away from Memphis Grills as their quality has tanked over the past couple of years) do a quite good job w/ pizza. Get a good thick pizza stone, heat the grill and stone to 600-800°f and let it settle there for 15 minutes before cooking, and you'll get some great pizza's. Like others we've found Pecan pellets to be really good but other woods work well too. Getting better than this from a food/taste quality standpoint requires a large oven with very accurate proportions. Many of the kits are too small or not proportioned correctly and the results are not as good as on the pellet grills. Sad and unromantic but it is what it is. There was one kit that people found worked well but I can't remember which one. Custom works well if the person building it knows what they're doing and gets the proportions correct. If there's a good wood or coal fired pizza place near you then find out who built theirs and use THAT EXACT SAME PERSON for yours. Someone else can do the decorative stuff on the outside but the oven, access and chimney are not easy to get right. Please post your outcome!

We have the Ooni Koda 16. We have been very happy with it. There is a learning curve. We used to make pizza on our Kamado Joe but the Ooni is so much better. We have made both Neapolitan and New York style and both came out great. If you go with the Ooni definitely get the pizza turning peel. Makes it so much easier to turn the pizza.