Maximize Your Home Pizza Experience: Choosing The Perfect Oven Size (Think Big!)

​When it comes to my personal pizzamaking proclivities, I am the home oven guy. Just look at the subtitle of my award-winning, bestselling, self-aggrandizing book, Free The Pizza. It’s all right there: A Simple System For Making Great Pizza Whenever You Want With The Oven You Already Have. 
 
I say this because learning pizza in your big home oven is so much easier and forgiving than teaching yourself pizza while also teaching yourself how to use some no-name company’s tiny no-name oven that was engineered for doing exactly one thing well: burning the hair off your knuckles. (I have one of those no-name ovens. I also have an Ooni. The difference is night and day. If you're going to buy a portable oven, Ooni is worth considering.)

If you feel you’ve outgrown your regular home oven, and you’re ready for a big home pizza oven, I recommend getting the biggest pizza oven you can justify. Just buy a big oven. After 20+ years of pizzamaking, it’s my opinion that a big oven will make you much happier over the long term. Fewer burnt knuckles and fewer horrific pizza-like blobs hurled into the back yard. 
 
For this exercise, I did some oven shopping on your behalf at Pizza Expo in Las Vegas. I talked to a few people who know a thing or two about bigger ovens. I was going to talk about the biggest ovens from Ooni and Gozney, and then changed my mind. We'll talk about them later in other blog posts. Instead, we're going BIG big.  

What is the biggest, most productive oven you could possibly buy?

I'm talking something that you’d never really think about, but if money is no object, it can bring a high degree of novelty (and massive volume) to your pizzamaking.
 
So, I bypassed all the wood-fired Italian dome ovens (of which there are plenty).

Instead, I went to a big booth full of high-priced stainless steel in the middle of the show floor.


That's where I buttonholed possibly the coolest guy in the pizza business. He travels the world serving his clients, I bet he has an expense account, and he never goes home at night covered in flour.  
 
His name is John Klingenberger, Sales Executive for XLT Ovens in Wichita, Kansas.
 
Most people would never think about this kind of product for the home. But if you’re a high roller with a giant kitchen and you have big parties, maybe XLT has your oven.
 
XLT makes big, heavy and fast conveyor ovens for the food service industry. They sell those ovens around the world to some of the biggest names in the pizza business.

If you’ve been inside a big chain pizzeria and seen one of those long ovens with a steel conveyor belt that carries a raw pizza in at one end, sending it inside a steel box and through the heat, then delivering a fully baked masterpiece at the other end, you’ve seen the kind of oven that XLT makes.

 
I had a hard time convincing John Klingenberger that I already know about Gozney and Ooni. I needed bigger. Mr. Klingenberger told me, “We specialize in the large, global chains. So if you’re in the US, and you want to expand that market, we’ve already positioned ourselves for parts, service, warranty, and delivery all throughout Europe. We will also sell to Blaine’s Pizza in Des Moines, and we’ll sell ‘em one oven.” 
 
He is understandably proud of XLT’s policy of treating every customer the same, whether they have 1,000 locations or just one location. He says, “That’s how we became the leader.” They’ve also got a seven-year warranty on the oven I was looking at, 10 years if I buy a hood when I buy the oven. And the ovens are designed to be easily repairable.  
 

I was looking at the bright, shiny, giant steel box in the middle of the booth. I’d just tried a couple of different slices of pizza made inside it, and they were really good.

I asked what this thing weighed. I was wondering if I might I need to reinforce my kitchen floor. Seems the base oven is around the curb weight of a Mini Cooper, and I'm guessing about the price of a loaded Ford F-150. (But don't quote me on that.)
 
The oven on the sales floor was apparently a single. John said, “That one’s almost 2,000 pounds for a single. I was going to give you a double, so a little over 2,000 pounds.”
 
“What’s the capacity? I mean, how many pizzas can I crank out?”

 
“120 pizzas an hour per day now.” And with a double? “You’re at 350 an hour.”
 
350 pizzas an hour? Suddenly, I’m thinking: pizza pop-ups.
 
I’ve got room in my kitchen for this oven.

I’ve got plenty of room in my yard for a JumboTron.

Is it possible to show a movie on the big TV in my yard, crank a few hundred pizzas out of my kitchen during those two hours, and become a kind of pop-up al-fresco Alamo Draft House for pizza operation while flying below the radar with the IRS and the city?

"What's that officer? Who are all those people eating pizza in my yard and watching Casablanca? Just a couple hundred friends and neighbors. We'll be done soon. Slice?" 

 
I thanked John, who still didn’t seem convinced that I understood the sheer insanity of putting this oven in a home kitchen. But he humored me, I thanked him for his time and patience, and hoped he’d have a fabulous April Fool’s Day.

You can find Ooni and Gozney online. If you want to reach John Klingenberger about an XLT oven, send me a message through the contact form at Free The Pizza. 
 
Special thanks to John Klingenberger, Brian D. and Chie Cline of XLT Ovens for participating in this madness.