This smart pizza oven improved my pie-making skills

I am an excellent home cook, if I do say so myself. I regularly produce restaurant-quality dishes from my smart kitchen. But I have two favorite dishes I’ve never mastered at home: pizza and burgers. Yes, I can make them, but do they taste as good as my local burger or pizza joint? Nope. Naturally, I was intrigued when I heard about the new smart pizza oven from Current, which launched at CES earlier this year.

Yes, I know pizza ovens have been a thing for a while with their enticing promise of making pizzeria-quality pizza at home. But they’re eye-wateringly expensive, and I’ve always been put off by the prospect of putting a wood or gas-burning appliance in my backyard for the sole purpose of making pizza. Current’s Model P Smart Pizza Oven is electric, so there’s no need to mess with fuel, plus it can be used outdoors and inside (in theory — but my initial attempts produced far too much smoke for indoor use to be viable).

The Model P costs $699, which is a lot, but significantly less than other options; the electric version of the popular Ooni oven is $899 without any connected features. Current is a startup based in Columbus, Georgia, that’s trying to electrify outdoor cooking (its first product was a smart electric outdoor grill). Its smart pizza oven is one of the first to feature an app for controlling the oven, with the choice of a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connection. The app has several tools that promise to help me make the perfect pizza. Challenge accepted.

The Model P can reach a blistering 850 degrees Fahrenheit. It cycles power between graphite tubes at the top and standard calrod heating elements on the bottom, and it uses proprietary algorithms to cook three different styles: Neapolitan, New York, and thin crust. There’s also a frozen pizza setting and a broil function, which you can use for any food that could benefit from a broil (such as searing a steak or browning some veggies), giving you a bit more functionality.

It comes with a 12-inch cordierite cooking stone, but you have to buy the pizza peel separately, which is required to pop the dough into the oven without burning your fingers. Current sent me a wooden one, which it says will be available soon; there’s a $89 steel version that you can buy bundled with the oven and a pizza cutter for $847.

The Current Backyard app (iOS and Android) allows for mobile control of the oven, sends notifications for preheating and cooking timers, and has a pizza build calculator that adjusts the cooking time based on how thin your crust is and how high you pile your pizza.

As the pizza cooks in around two minutes, the alerts for preheating (which takes a while) and the pizza calculator were the most useful, as my past attempts at homemade pizzas often resulted in soggy toppings and undercooked crusts.

To put the Model P through its paces, I invited a few friends over for a pizza party and set it up on a wooden table on my porch, a few inches away from a brick wall. You have to consider placement carefully because it gets very hot. It’s elevated by four metal legs, so it’s safe to use on most surfaces. (There’s an outdoor pizza cart available for $499 if you want something more tailored.)

Current recommends making your own pizza dough, and there’s a recipe in the app you can follow. Current also recommends store-bought dough from Trader Joe’s and Publix; I went for the easy option.

I set up an indoor pizza-making station, with a large wooden cutting board, lots of flour, several portions of Trader Joe’s pizza dough and premade pizza sauce, and some standard toppings: mozzarella, pepperoni, olives, and basil. We then proceeded to go crazy twirling dough and topping pizzas.

Our first few pizzas were a bit of a disaster. We made a plain mozzarella pizza on New York-style (635F) and followed the suggested six minutes of oven time, but it came out overcooked. The next attempt had too many toppings, and the dough got stuck to the pizza peel mid-flick, launching cheese and pepperoni onto the molten stone, resulting in a smoky mess.

I did like the option to make concurrent pizzas with a button press — no need to start the preheat over. And not having to rotate the pizza, combined with getting alerts on my phone when the pie was ready, meant I didn’t have to hover over it.

But by our third pizza, the stone had a thick layer of burnt cheese on it, so I had to stop the party and go back to the cutting board.

I realized I had been too eager, assuming the oven would magically deliver perfect pizzas. It turns out that there was quite a bit more prep I needed to do, the most important being buying a bag of semolina flour. Apparently, this is a magic pizza-making ingredient.

I went back to Current for more tips — especially about cleaning the stone, which needs to be done carefully. It can’t be soaked or scrubbed with anything more abrasive than a nylon brush. I bought some new dough and followed Current’s detailed YouTube video on how to properly roll it out (sadly, no twirling required). I then fired up the app to use the neat pizza builder tool that customizes the cook time based on style, dough type, and thickness, as well as how much sauce, cheese, and toppings you have.

Armed with semolina and a tad more patience, my next attempt was with the Neapolitan style, which yields a crispier pizza and uses the oven’s top temperature of 850F to get those signature burnt leopard spots. This is the type of pizza you eat at a sidewalk cafe in Italy. The downside was that it took a while to heat up, but the pizza only took two minutes to cook.

I was more successful, producing an almost perfect Neapolitan-style buffalo mozzarella and pepperoni pizza with a delightfully puffy (if slightly misshapen) crust. There was still a fair amount of smoke, though, and my husband (who’s a firefighter) is still not keen on me using the oven indoors.

My only other complaint is that the cheese wasn’t hot all the way through; next time, I’ll opt for thinner slices. I then popped in a more traditional shredded mozzarella pizza for my daughter, going with New York-style as she likes the softer crust. After two bites, she declared it was as good as her favorite cheese pizza from Pisanos, our favorite local spot.

Hardware-wise, the oven’s sleek, domed design and glass door would look great on a kitchen counter — if you have the space. At just over 40 pounds, it’s not that portable, but it feels solid and well built. The on-device controls include a large LCD display with touch controls for turning the power on and off and setting a timer. This is paired with a physical dial to adjust time and temperature and select different pizza styles.

I would like to see a physical on / off button, as I worry about the longevity of a touchscreen on a device that can be used outdoors. (It isn’t waterproof, so you shouldn’t leave it uncovered.) Although I could control all the functions in the app, including turning it off. But, as with most high-heat smart appliances, you have to confirm on the device to turn it on for obvious safety reasons.

I enjoyed using the oven, and it is a great piece of kit for a backyard party, but I don’t see adding it to my regular cooking routine. Making pizza is an art that I’m far from mastering, even with the Model P’s advanced tech. While it brought me closer to being a pizza apprentice, it also reinforced that, for me, pizza night means not cooking. Pisanos can rest easy — pizza delivery night isn’t going anywhere.

Photos by Jennifer Pattison Tuohy / The Verge