Gozney Roccbox pizza oven (dual fuel) review: Small and perfectly formed
The Roccbox produces flawless, efficient results with gas but it’s greedy with wood
Pros
- Portable
- Excellent results with gas
- Easy to set up and use
Cons
- Requires a lot of wood
- Expensive
The Gozney Roccbox is a stylish pizza oven designed to create restaurant-style pizzas in your own garden. It’s the smallest of Gozney’s three pre-built ovens, and its dinky size and carry strap make it portable, too.
Suitable for use with wood and gas, the multi-fuel model offers greater flexibility over its gas-only version, allowing you to choose between the stability of gas cooking and authentic flavour of wood. Much like a professional pizza oven, the Roccbox is capable of reaching an impressive 500ºC, with pizza taking as little as 60 seconds to cook.
Gozney Roccbox pizza oven (dual fuel) review: What do you get for the money?
Gozney has built this pizza oven with usability in mind. Open the box and you’ll find it’s pretty much ready to use, with the pizza stone and retractable legs already fitted. Buy the dual-fuel option and you get both a detachable gas and wood burner that can be fitted by hand (no screws required).
There are also a couple of accessories in the box. These include a bottle opener, which doubles as a hook for a safe way to add and remove fresh wood when the oven is hot, as well as a metal pizza peel to quickly get your pizzas into and out of the oven.
The Roccbox doesn’t look like your standard at-home pizza oven. It’s available in grey and green, and while the main structure including the legs and burner are made from steel, the outer shell is made from a matte silicone. This makes the top and sides safer to touch, minimising the risk of heat-related accidents, and it also gives the Roccbox a unique look. There’s also an inconspicuous thermometer on the side, which allows you to monitor the oven’s temperature.
All of this will set you back a fairly hefty £499, or £399 if you opt for the gas-only version. It’s a lot of money but, unlike many of Gozney’s competitors, the Roccbox is ready to cook straight out of the box. The Ooni Karu 12 multi-fuel oven, for example, costs £299, but the gas burner and pizza peel are sold separately, which bumps the cost to £410. The Karu 12 doesn’t have a built-in thermometer, either, so unless you’re really trying to save the pennies it will come down to which style of oven you prefer.
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Gozney Roccbox pizza oven (dual fuel) review: What’s good about it?
While the Roccbox isn’t the lightest 12in pizza oven you can buy – it weighs a sturdy 20kg – it’s still relatively portable. I wouldn’t consider myself a particularly strong person, but I was able to carry it across my garden and place it onto a table two-handed without putting my back out. The velcro strap makes life easier, and the dome-like design, retractable legs and detachable burner all aid portability. If you wanted to take this to the beach (or a pizza oven-friendly park) in your car, you absolutely could.
In testing, the Roccbox made quick work of cooking my pizza. Despite its dinky size, Gozney claims a cooking time of 60 seconds once it’s up to temperature. When used with the wood burner, I found that to be fairly accurate: after 60 seconds, pizza was definitely cooked through, albeit a little pale. If you prefer a more crispy, blistered crust, you’re looking at nearer two minutes with wood. Gas, on the other hand, produced perfectly blistered, crisp results in 60 seconds – sometimes less.
Gas brings out the best in the Roccbox; it was originally created as a gas-only oven and we can see why. Not only is it fairly fuel-efficient – heat-up time plus five pizzas barely put a dent in our 5kg of patio gas – but it also produced an appealing, tasty pizza. Moreover, its gas burner allows you to control the intensity of the flame with ease, which is helpful if you’re cooking other dishes that require a lower temperature.
I was also impressed at how user-friendly this oven is. Getting pizza into an outdoor oven is quite tricky if you’ve never done it before, but the included pizza paddle made this much easier. Pizzas were also fairly easy to turn during cooking, especially if you use a dedicated pizza peel. You can use the paddle itself, but it does take a bit more practice to get the correct turning motion.
Gozney Roccbox pizza oven (dual fuel) review: What could be better?
You’ll need to prepare yourself for a long wait if you’re using this oven with wood. I cooked with the Roccbox on a mild day – around 12ºC – and after 60 minutes of preheating, the oven had only reached 400ºC. By this point, I’d also burned through quite a bit of wood and found myself constantly having to top it up. My results may have varied on a hotter day, but it still doesn’t change the fact that the burner is simply too small for the oven. Moreover, as it’s attached to the outside of the oven, some of the heat is lost through the back and the flame is more affected by the elements. It was still hot enough to cook my pizzas evenly and quickly, but the result wasn’t as good as when I used gas, even with the oven at 400ºC.
With this in mind, another downside to the Roccbox’s dual-fuel design is that it’s £100 more than its gas-only counterpart. Wood is a lot cheaper than gas, but it wasn’t anywhere near as efficient at cooking in my testing – and it required constant feeding, too. What’s more, if you’re using it out and about, you don’t want to be lugging around a huge box of wood just to keep it going for a few hours.
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Gozney Roccbox pizza oven (dual fuel) review: Should you buy it?
There’s no denying that this is a very capable portable pizza oven, and particularly so if you’re cooking with gas. However, while it’s great to have the option to cook with wood, the Roccbox’s external stove design means that it’s slow to heat up and less consistent than gas – there are better pure wood-fired models on the market. Indeed, if you have your heart set on a wood-fired oven, you’ll get better value from a wood-only model, such as the Ooni Fyra wood pellet oven (£249).
If you’re dead set on a dual-fuel model, though, and you can live with the lengthy wood-fired heat-up time – and the price – there’s a lot to like here. The Roccbox’s unique design, portability, generous clutch of accessories and ease of use form a charming package that’s perfect for beginners and beyond.