Bye bye barbecue — Jamie Oliver’s pizza oven is the only way I’m cooking this summer

Tefal Jamie Oliver by Tefal JM4168G1 Stone-bake Pizza Oven: was £349.99 now £279.99 at Amazon

Amazon often has a sale on their pizza ovens and, right now, with a Prime account, you can get this for £70 less than the RRP.

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When Jamie Oliver puts his name to a kitchen gadget, you know it’s going to bring a bit of flair, a lot of flavour, and a whole load of family-friendly fun. His latest collaboration with Tefal — a compact pizza oven promising restaurant-quality results from the comfort of your back garden — is no exception.

Known for his no-fuss approach to cooking and passion for good ingredients, Jamie’s aim here is simple: to help you create stone-baked, Neapolitan-style pizzas in minutes, without needing a wood-fired setup or a degree in dough stretching.

The woman&home team has used and loved Jamie Oliver's Air Fryer made in collaboration, so I was called upon to test this Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven. Having made over 250,000 pizzas in my little life (my family runs a pizza business), I knew what I needed to test to find out whether it can deliver the goods. I fired it up to find out.

Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven Specifications

Unboxing the Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven

Pizza ovens are not the most letterbox friendly packages to receive, so it’s always good to get some notice on when yours is due to arrive. Luckily for you, Tefal is a really communicative brand, so you always know where your parcel is and when it’s due to arrive. Although, when this turns up at your door, there are no doubts on what’s arrived. The Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven is a big piece of kit.

The box is long and heavy, but you get two handles on either side that make it pretty easy to heft up and carry around to your perfect place. Inside the box, your pizza oven comes almost assembled. There are some plastics packed around the pizza oven, mostly there to keep the oven’s stones from splitting and smashing in transit. You’ll need to reach inside the oven to fully remove all the padding and then you have to screw and place the different aspects of the inside and the turning wheel in place. It’s a very small amount of work to do before the oven is set up and ready to go, which can’t be said for all pizza ovens.

Of course, in an ideal world, the packaging would have been 100% recyclable, but it’s tricky to transport this kind of weight and these materials without some plastics.

Tefal sends you a pizza peel, which is really helpful for getting your pizza in and out of the oven. Lots of brands sell this separately, so you’re in luck with this one. It’s not the most robust one I’ve handled, but it didn’t bend or break in any of my tests, which has to go down as a big win. Aside from that, the one extra you’ll need to buy is a bottle of gas to power the oven. You have a hose and an attachment, but you won’t get far until you’ve invested in your own bottle of gas.

Who would the Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven suit?

The Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven is ideal for beginners who want to try their hand at homemade pizza without the learning curve of traditional ovens. The stone inside this oven can be rotated using a handle on the side, which means you don't need to juggle moving the pizza around to get an even cook. This is a stroke of genius. Truly.

Its compact size makes it perfect for small homes, balconies, or even camping trips. It runs on gas, which means that you don't have the big chimney in the top and the legs of the pizza oven fold down, making it really easy to store, when it's cool, of course.

Finally, the price point is great for those cooking on a budget. Whether you're a student, a busy parent, or just someone who loves good food without the faff, this oven brings Jamie’s signature no-nonsense style to your countertop.

What is the Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven like to use?

Before you cook on the oven for the first time Tefal recommends letting the flames run for two hours before letting the oven cool and then lighting it again. Most brands suggest that you light the oven for thirty minutes before use, so two hours feels a lot like overkill, but who am I to argue? Just make sure you start your pizza cooking early.

Once I had gone through the heating and cooling rigmarole, the oven was ready to go and my stomach was too.

Test 1: pizza

Pizza is in the name, so I had to check that the Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven was up to scratch. I like to make a few different types of pizza to test a few factors in the oven, but let’s start with a simple margherita.

I rolled out 8oz of dough to make a 12-inch pizza. I actually made the pizza directly on the peel, because this makes popping the base in the oven really easy. If you choose to do it on a board, you'll have to navigate some shuffling around when you're getting it in the oven.

You’ll quickly get the hang of sliding your pizza off the peel and onto the rotating disc on the bottom of the oven. I’ve had a fair bit of experience doing this, so brought along some pizza novices to see whether they could perfect the pizza placement and they picked it up instantly (or had been practicing in secret and not telling me).

Once your pizza is in place on the stone, you can twist the dial at the side of the oven, which will rotate your pizza. I kept doing this for the whole time that the pizza was in the oven, hoping for an even cook. You could do a small amount of time on each side, rotating every 15 seconds, but I liked my way. It gave a much more even cook, not that I’m biased.

This rotating base is a really great innovation for pizza novices. One of the hardest pats of cooking a pizza is rotating it in the oven, because getting the paddle underneath and flicking your pizza round is a typical time when you might make a hole in the base of your pizza — things only get messier from here. I was really impressed with how smooth this whole mechanism is. It’s a real game-changer that opens up the accessibility of pizza ovens to complete novices.

Back onto my pizzas. The margherita that I did first cooked beautifully. The crust speckled, the base was evenly spotted underneath, and my cheese melted across the top wonderfully. I really couldn’t fault it. As I continued to cook pizzas, a few made their way too close to the flames and caught on one edge and some burnt on the base if I left the flames running with nothing on the base for too long, but these are problems that you would come across with any pizza oven. I think you could easily call them ‘teething issues’.

When I loaded up only pizza with vegetables , I opened up the possibilities of more holes in the base, because this can get quite heavy. However, because you’re not sliding the peel under raw dough (instead you’re twisting a wheel that rotates the pizza), you get a really nice, consistent cook across the whole pizza, as well as a crispy base. All my vegetables cooked right through and the pizza base was nice and crisp on the outside and doughy in the crust.

Test 2: roasted vegetables

You don’t have to stop at pizzas and calzones with your oven. If you’ve watched any of Jamie Oliver’s series on TV, you’ll have seen him slow cooking salmon and smoking vegetables. I scaled back his cheffy talents and did a simple cast iron roast of some classic vegetables. This is really easy. If you have a cast iron dish, you can chop up courgettes, peppers, onions, mushrooms (and anything else that takes your fancy), drizzle them with oil, and sit the pan on the turntable.

As with the pizza, I kept the base in constant, even rotation. The vegetables cooked beautifully. You can see they got some lovely black crispy bits on the edges, but they were wonderfully tender and reduced to some delicious, sweet flesh inside. My vegetables needed about five minutes and, given that this is longer than my 60 second pizza, I left the cast iron to sit for longer. You can let the vegetables stay near the flames for a minute before giving them a rotation and a stir. You don’t want to be twisting that dial for a solid five minutes — there’s conversation to be had and sun to be enjoyed.

Test 3: nachos

I gave promised that pizza ovens deliver versatility and I am here to prove it, so here you are — nachos. Now, these rarely need long at home, but there’s something about the way a pizza oven toasts the tortilla chips and melts the cheese that makes my stomach growl.

It you want a little behind the scenes, the first time I put these in, my nacho chips caught fire. I didn’t realise and commended how bright and energetic the flames were. Then, after a twist, when my cast iron rotated, I suddenly spotted that the fire was twisting too and my chips were on fire. With my lesson learnt, I kept the chips more central in the cast iron and spun them constantly. They didn’t need more than 45 seconds before my cheese had melted, vegetables had toasted, and chips had crisped. I was full before these came out of the oven, but they smelt so good that one nibble turned into a second dinner. It’s an irresistible, easy dish to whip up, especially if you’re feeding lots of people.

Test 4: cookies

My tests aren’t complete if I can’t do a sweet treat. For this set of tests, I made cookies. It’s no wonder I become more popular when I’m testing pizza ovens.

Over the years, I’ve learnt that these are best enjoyed on low and slow heat, so I turned the flames down, loaded the cast iron skillet up, and popped the cookies in. Sugar can catch and burn really easily in pizza ovens, so I kept the base moving and, sure enough, in a few minutes, my cookies were brown on top and ready to eat. Well, I say ready, they were boiling hot and gooey, but we couldn’t resist. Once they cooled, they were much more cookie-ish (gooey on the inside, but with good structure on the outside), but who can wait that long?

Cleaning the Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven

Cleaning your pizza oven is difficult. I have one rule, which is that your oven should always be cool when you’re cleaning. For the most part, you’ll need to embrace the scrapes and scratches badges of honours. They show that you’ve loved and used your pizza oven. If you want to, you can buy a wire brush to scrape up all your flour from the base of the oven. Alternatively, the stones on the bottom of Jamie Oliver’s pizza ovens can be lifted up and washed. Make sure that you use a gentle washing up liquid, such as Ecover and thoroughly wash it off your stones (and dry them) before you put them back in the oven.

Beyond that, the oven keeps itself in good condition. Whilst you should use it outside and on a heat proof surface, it’s also a good idea to bring it inside so that it doesn’t get exposed to and attacked by the natural elements.

How does the Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven compare?

I’m a bit of a pizza oven snob, even at the best of times, but I feel confident eating that this is the best budget pizza oven, especially for beginners. It’s slim, easy to use, and impressively versatile, which makes it hard to beat.

I tested it directly alongside the Woody Pizza Oven, which feels almost identical to use. The big difference is that the Woody doesn’t have a rotating base, so you need to learn to rotate the pizza yourself, which will almost certainly leave you with a few burnt crusts. The perk of the Woody oven is that you can convert it to wood-fuel as well as gas, which you can’t do with the Jamie Oliver oven and again, wood takes a bit more skill. So, if you want to explore a bit more and you have some extra space, the Woody is a nice choice. However, if this is your first pizza oven and you want simplicity and ease, you can’t go wrong with Jamie.

You might spot that there's a third pizza oven in this picture, the Gozney Arc. This is the pizza oven that I've used (and loved) for over a year now. It has more space, the flames come in from the side, as opposed to the back, which makes for better cooking. Overall, it has a more luxurious, premium feel in comparison to the Tefal Jamie Oliver Pizza Oven, but that's no surprise, because it's £200 more. You will need to learn how to spin a pizza in the oven yourself, but if you know you want to commit to cooking outdoors, this is a solid investment.

Should you buy it?

Sleek and simple, I love this pizza oven. Even as a snob who’s willing to splurge on something as expensive as a Gozney oven, I would definitely recommend the Jamie Oliver Tefal Pizza Oven design. They’ve helped to minimise the places that you might make errors and mess up your pizza, so, overall, you’re set on a good course for making some delicious pizza.

How we test