My family has been on the quest for perfect homemade pizzas for a long time. As well as buying and trying a pizza stone for our Weber barbecue, I bought a huge ridiculous brick oven for the garden (which was an absolute nightmare to get into place…a whole other story!) and we’ve tried a cast-iron outdoor oven too.
Cooking pizzas on a stone in an oven indoors is good, but the results are never as impressive as ones you cook in a proper outdoor pizza oven
A few weeks ago the opportunity arose for me to borrow a Witt Etna Rotante pizza oven and give it a try out so we leaped at the chance. The Witt is gas-powered, has a couple of very funky features and promises pizzas in about a minute.
What makes the Witt Etna Rotante different?
The Witt Etna Rotante has two burners. There’s a semi-circular burner that runs around the back of the oven and a second burner underneath the circular pizza stone
In addition the circular pizza stone rotates to ensure the pizza gets even exposure to that semi-circular flame at the back of the oven
Transcript
Pizzas are pretty , much universally popular. They only require a few ingredients and they aren’t expensive to make, BUT there’s pizzas…. and there’s pizzas
So what’s a pizza like that’s cooked in a top-of-the-range £700 or $900 gas-powered outdoor oven?
In this video I’m road-testing the Witt Etna Rotante, the Danish stonebaked gas powered pizza oven with two really hot features
Quick disclosure, this isn’t actually our pizza oven although I wish it was! We had it loaned to us by my sister so I could write about it but I decided to make the video independent of that, I wasn’t compensated for it and everything is my own opinion
The first thing to point out about the Etna Rotante is it’s big, really big and it weighs in at 37.5kg, that’s three times what some of the popular rival pizza ovens cost, but that weight is a trade-off, you are getting a really solid oven with double insulation keeping running costs down and cooking time to a minimum
And then there’s the heating elements of this oven. Firstly there’s a U-shaped burner which runs round the back of the oven which looks incredible when it’s fired up and beneath the stone is a second booster burner which keeps the base of the oven at a consistent baking temperature. Then the best feature of all… in this oven the pizza stone rotates which gives you that impressive even finish to your homemade pizzas
Power for the turntable and gas ignition comes from either a supplied mains cable or a compartment under the oven which holds 4 AA batteries
Each pizza takes about 90 seconds to cook and every one comes out perfectly cooked with puffed up leopard dotted crusts. I didn’t realise there was actually a name for that, but every day is a school day!
That pizza stone is removable in two parts so easy to wash off, of course with all stones you only use warm water to clean it and the darker it goes the more of a badge of honour for your pizza baking it is!
If you don’t already have one you might want to invest in a bamboo peel for using with this oven, bamboo is best for uncooked dough so it doesn’t stick when you are trying to slide it onto the stone and metal is best for extracting the cooked pizza
Once in the oven, you can actually watch the pizza changing in size and colour before your eyes as it rotates in the oven. That speedy cook and constant even heat provided by the booster burner under the stone means there’s no waiting around as you can cook a stream of pizzas in quick succession serving the whole family in about 5 minutes
The Rotante is available in 4 finishes, orange, black, stone or anthracite
What we love about this oven is that you get puffed-up, firm, crisp bases while still keeping the toppings of your pizza fresh and appetising. We’ve tried stones on barbecues, stones in ovens, pizzas in air fryers, and even a ridiculous expensive brick oven we ended up smashing up and nothing has made pizzas at home to this standard.
But there are a couple of small downsides to this pizza oven. Firstly you need somewhere to put it and ideally to leave it permanently otherwise you’ll need somewhere to store it and two people to lift it every time you move it. If you do decide to leave it in the garden, Witt make a cover for the oven so you can keep it clean. I haven’t had it out in another weather yet to see how clean that stone finish stays long-term
Secondly, the supplied tube that connects it to the gas bottle isn’t really long enough. Ideally, you’d have something that was long enough to reach from counter height to the height of a gas bottle placed on the floor, but this one is only 80cm long so we had to elevate our gas bottle up on a fire pit. You can replace it yourself though, I just wish the right length one came as standard
Link to purchase
Witt Rotante Pizza Oven https://geni.us/MBQY