There are five good pizzerias within 10 minutes of my house, and I’ve made plenty of decent pizzas in my regular oven. Can I really sell myself on an outdoor pizza oven that cooks one pie at a time – especially when it’s me doing all the work?

I tested three portable ovens: the Gozney Roccbox, the Ooni Karu 12 and the Ovana. My aims were two-fold. I wanted to know how versatile these units were because while pizza is great, I don’t need to eat it every day. There’s no room in my culinary stable for a one-trick pony. So, can you do anything else in these contraptions?

Secondly, if I was sold on the overall concept (spoiler: gimme), I needed to know which hotbox is a hit.

Let’s cover the basics. Portable pizza ovens run on gas bottles and must be used outdoors. Both the Gozney and Ooni also have optional wood or charcoal-burning attachments. They each have a slitted post-box opening, a stone base and a curved ceiling that distributes heat. You can leave them out in the weather, and they don’t really need cleaning because they get so hot – up to about 500C. They’re sturdy little companions and could easily be packed for camping trips or holiday houses.

Pizza

We’ll get onto the differences between the models later, but the major takeaway is that each of these ovens is great, easy enough to use and excels at its “you-had-one-job” job: pizza.

Each of them turns out a pizza in a minute or two, cooking the underside with the hot stone base and sizzling the top with radiant heat.

It’s hands-on cooking: the heat isn’t even, meaning pizzas need to be rotated every 20 or 30 seconds using a slender metal peel. You can’t wander off and grate some cheese or check the footy scores.

The results are stellar, though. Anyone you’re feeding will be big on the “ooh” and the “wow”. Eating hot, fresh pizza beats soggy stuff scootered through the streets, and there’s no comparison at all to the pizza I used to cook in my regular oven.

Other stuff

To cook anything other than pizza, you need a cast-iron frying pan that can handle high heat. The ovens are small and shallow, so taller, larger pans may not fit. I found the results more consistent when I pre-heated the pan, then removed it to add the ingredients.

Each oven has a temperature dial, but it’s way harder to control the heat in these units than it is in a regular oven. Reader, I set a few foods on fire as I schooled up.

Tip: Make sure you have thick oven mitts and use them religiously.

Steak, chops, roasts

I absolutely love cooking meat in my fleet of pizza ovens. It can take a bit of fiddling to adjust the heat, but the flavours are great and high heat seems to lock in the juiciness, too. I especially liked doing meat with the charcoal-burner installed on my Ooni.

Flatter cuts work better: butterflied chicken is a yes, standing rib roast is a no. Pork chop, rolled lamb roast and rib-eye all tasted ravishing.

Mussels

I put half a kilo of mussels in a shallow cast-iron pan with a splash of white wine, mandarin segments and juice, and some chopped spring onions. The shellfish cooked in about three minutes with a couple of quick tosses. With such high heat, a few shells got a bit charry, but the flavours were brilliant.

Fry-up

There are so many ways to get a fry-up happening in a pizza oven. My favourite is to tumble chopped potatoes, brussels sprouts and bacon together in a pan and get them sizzling, before cracking in an egg and cooking it until the white sets and the yolk is still jiggly.

Bake a quick flatbread hot on its heels and you’ve got a breakfast of pizza-oven champions.

Chestnuts

Chestnuts are great, but they’re a hassle to peel – or are they? I cut a little slit into raw chestnuts, put them in a cast-iron pan in the hot oven, tossed them every minute or so for eight minutes until they were nicely charred and a knife easily pierced the flesh. After setting them aside to cool slightly, I peeled away the shell to reveal creamy chestnuts, which I ate both on their own and used as a pizza topping with blue cheese and rocket. It was by far my easiest chestnut encounter ever.

Spiced apple drink

Apple juice, spices, a bit of maple syrup and a squeeze of lemon simmered in the oven until the flavours meld make for a nice cool-weather punch that can be amped up with gin, vodka or whisky. This works perfectly well in the pizza oven, but a deeper saucepan would be more practical and would allow me to make more at once.

Roasted figs

While the oven is cooling, why not put in some fruit to gently soften? Figs, pears, apples and grapes are all delightful, collapsing into jammy deliciousness.

Eating hot, fresh pizza beats soggy stuff scootered through the streets, and there’s no comparison at all to the pizza I used to cook in my regular oven.

The verdict

If you have the money and the outdoor space, I reckon it’s worth getting one. They are fun and more useful than you might think.

But which portable pizza oven?

You won’t go wrong with any of these ovens. They all do the job and are easy to use. The Ovana ($589) doesn’t have a wood or charcoal option, but it has the controls and the temperature gauge at the front of the unit, which is more convenient. The Ooni ($649) and the Gozney ($799) are both controlled from the rear.

The Ooni doesn’t have a built-in temperature gauge but they’re not very accurate anyway because the oven temperature can vary so widely – up to 200C – from the hot spots near the flame to cooler spots near the opening.

Gozney spruiks its silicon coating, which does keep the oven cooler, but it still gets very hot. You need to exercise the same caution with all of them.

The Ooni and Ovana both have a door, which means you can create a true hotbox. I love the solid feel of the Ooni door – it’s like closing a safe – while the thin Ovana door gets stuck and can be tricky to remove.

The Gozney’s stone base is built in, while the other two are removable. If the stone cracks for some reason, it’s going to be more hassle to get the Gozney fixed.

Each oven has an optional cover and carry case. If you want to move it around, the Ooni is much lighter (12kg) than the Ovana (17.3kg) or the Gozney Roccbox (20kg).

So? My favourite is the Ooni. I love the look of it with its cute removable chimney; the lighter weight, dual-fuel options; and the nice door. It’s the most compact of the three, yet still has a slightly higher opening, meaning you may be able to cook more dishes in cast-iron pans.