To make the best pizza at home, you need a dedicated pizza oven. But that's not all you need. Unless you plan on ruining your pizza, making a huge mess or severely burning yourself — or perhaps all three — you're also going to need a slew of pizza oven accessories. The exact assortment and number of accessories are ultimately up to you based on how easy you want your pizza-making to be, but everyone should have at least a couple of the below accessories to go along with their pizza oven.
How We Tested
We make a ton of pizza — just take a look at our guide to the best home pizza ovens, where we spent months and years testing all (and we mean all) of the top pizza ovens in our respective homes. So we're confident in saying we know what's needed to cook a primo pie at home. We've used a number of pizza oven accessories, some great, some not-so-great. Below are some of our favorites.
Ooni Perforated Pizza Peel
Your standard metal pizza peel is a large, thin and flat disc or square attached to the end of a long handle that you use to launch your dough and remove your cooked pizza from the oven. Any decently-made example will be mostly fine. But if you want to step up your game a bit, Ooni clearly put a lot of thought into its Perforated Pizza Peel. This peel has grooves that help keep your dough from sticking, along with perforations on the bottom that allow extra flour to fall by the wayside. Our tester loves how lightweight and easy to maneuver it is (it's made from aluminum), along with the super-thin and tapered edge that makes sliding under his finished pizza a breeze. One word to the wise from our tester, though: use plenty of flour with this peel. Dough that's overly sticky can sometimes get stuck in the holes of the peel, making it difficult to slide off. Using enough flour prevents this, and the perforations will make sure that you don't end up with too much.
Ooni Bamboo Pizza Peel & Serving Board
While an aluminum peel is great for launching and removing your pizza, it's not the best serving vessel. For that, we prefer a wooden peel, and they don't get any better than Ooni's Bamboo Pizza Peel. For one, it's beautiful, with visible grain and a smooth, glossy finish. But it's also quite practical. Bamboo is a lightweight material, so it's considerably lighter than it looks, yet it's still durable enough to hold up against repeated cuts from a pizza slicer. Our tester loves to use this peel when removing pizzas from his oven. Even though it's thicker than an aluminum peel, the edge is tapered enough to easily slide under a cooked pie, and then it's straight onto the table for slicing and serving. It just doesn't get any easier than that.
Gozney Turning Peel
Like rival Ooni, Gozney makes a couple of different peels. This one is intended for the Gozney Dome, a restaurant-quality oven that our reviewer states makes the best pizza of any home oven, where it's pretty indispensable, as our tester says the Dome requires skillful turns in extreme heat. The Gozney Turning Peel's weighted handle is crazy long at nearly three feet, allowing you to be as far or near your oven as you like as you perfect your turns. It's made from steel, and the actual peel is extremely thin for nimbly getting under and spinning your dough.
ThermoWorks Industrial IR Gun
If there's one thing ThermoWorks knows, it's infrared thermometers. This industrial-level thermometer gun from the brand isn't designed specifically for pizza ovens, but with a max temperature rating of 1,022 degrees, it's more than up to the task. It fires a single laser with a distance-to-targe ratio of 12:1, meaning a 12-inch distance will measure a 1-inch space inside your oven. And using it couldn't be easier: just point and pull the trigger, and you'll get an accurate temperature reading instantly.
Solo Stove Gloves
Solo Stove's main claim to fame is fire pits, with the brand only recently getting into pizza ovens. Its fan-favorite gloves are ideal for both, as they're comfortable, they don't hinder your movement and, most importantly, they protect you from being burned at temperatures up to 450 degrees. They've got long cuffs to protect your wrists and grippy palms to give you extra confidence in whatever you're doing with your oven. Our reviewer found the gloves to be a necessity for the Solo Stove Pi Fire Pizza Oven, which cooks with a live flame from a fire pit, but the gloves are extremely useful with any pizza oven.
Ooni Professional Pizza Cutter Wheel
Wheel pizza cutters often get a bad rap, and we can understand why: a lot of them are junk. Ooni's, unsurprisingly, is not. This cutter is extremely sharp right out of the box (be careful), and our tester says it glides through pizza like butter in a single pass — no mowing back and forth like you're trying to saw down a tree. Our tester also appreciates the solid and non-slip grip, as he's never come close to slipping and cutting himself with this blade. And even though our tester hand-washes his, the cutter is dishwasher-safe.
Gozney Pizza Rocker
If you prefer a rocker-style pizza cutter, then you can't beat Gozney's rendition. With its wooden handle, thick steel blade, sleek shape and rustic style, it looks more like a piece of ninja weaponry than something you'd use to slice pizza. And while we can't speak to its usefulness in a fight in Feudal Japan, we're pretty in touting its pizza-cutting ability. The blade is extremely sharp and plenty hefty, and its smooth action is designed to keep the toppings on your pizza where they belong when slicing.
Ooni Pizza Oven Brush
The inside of your pizza oven will get dirty, but they're not really the type of thing you can deep clean. Instead, a scrape here and a brush there are all you need, and Ooni's Pizza Oven Brush is the tool for the job. While some brushes use plastic bristles that will melt in high-heat situations, Ooni's brush features stainless steel bristles. Although we recommend waiting until your oven cools to clean it, sometimes accidents happen where you need to quickly brush something out of a hot oven, and in those cases, this is a godsend. It also features a built-in scraper for removing any caked-on residue that's too large and stubborn to burn off.
Oxo Good Grips Multi-Purpose Scraper & Chopper
Oxo's Good Grips line of kitchen utensils and accessories rarely lets us down (if ever), and the brand's bench scraper certainly follows in that tradition. The blade is stainless steel and easily chops through dough, with built-in markings that make it easy to measure out consistently-sized balls. Then there's the grip, which is soft and comfortable in hand but also sticky enough so that you won't lose your grasp.
Types of Pizza Oven Accessories
Pizza Peel: The most important accessory for your pizza oven is a peel — it's pretty much impossible (not to mention unsafe) to use your oven without one. There are various types of peels: those used to launch and remove your pizza, those that double as serving vessels and turning peels that are used to rotate your pie mid-cook. You may find that you require more than one peel to adequately meet your needs.
Infrared Thermometer: Pizza ovens aren't always equipped with a built-in thermometer, and even when they are, it's still a good idea to have an infrared thermometer on hand to monitor the temperature inside your oven and to check for any cold spots. Knowing how hot your oven is at any given moment is a key to great pizza, and these thermometers — which read temperature via laser from a distance, making them ideal for hot pizza ovens — are essential for providing that data.
Pizza Cutter: Unless you plan on picking up your pizza and housing it all by yourself, you're going to need to slice it up prior to serving. The two main types of pizza cutters are the classic wheel style and the blade-like rocker style. Neither is necessarily better than the other, and the one you choose will come down to personal preference.
Heat-Resistant Gloves: Pizza ovens get hot — sometimes exceeding temperatures greater than 900 degrees Fahrenheit. That's about twice as hot as your average kitchen oven, and you don't want to go sticking your hands inside a pizza oven while it's running. For safety's sake, equipping yourself with a durable pair of heat-resistant gloves — like the kind you might use to tend a fire — will bring a level of protection against burns.
Bench Scraper: Before you launch your pizza, you need to get your dough sorted out. And whether you're making your own from scratch or working with pre-made dough, having a quality bench scraper on hand will make your life easier. You'll use this to cut your dough into appropriately sized balls and to scrape up any sticky bits of dough on your counter.
