Gozney’s New Arc Oven Enables Easy Backyard Pizza-Making
It’s a friendly, high-temperature grill replacement
We have been pizza and bread obsessed since before home pizza grills boomed during the early days of the pandemic. Bread-baking is pretty therapeutic. Kneading dough alone is a great way to deal with existential angst. And then there’s the fact that a bit of fermentation from overnight proofing happens to be more friendly to most guts than any store-bought dough, not to mention, homemade bread of any kind (including gluten-free, which we’ve also experimented with) just tastes fantastic, especially when it’s piping hot from a 900-degree oven.
In the past several years we’ve tested a bunch of pizza ovens, including Gozney’s larger Dome, which these days retails for $1,799. But the new Arc and Arc XL start at $699, and that lower price is very appealing. You’d wisely ask, then: what you’re losing out on? The short answer is some utility. The Dome can burn both wood and propane or natural gas. The Arcs only work on gas. Also, the size of the opening is a little smaller with the Arc, and that can matter for cooking some other kinds of breads. There are distinct advantages, as well. At 47 pounds the Arc that we tested could be lifted pretty easily off its stand or a table and put away in winter or just when you want it out of the way; At 128 pounds the Dome is too burley for that.
There’s one reason why making pizza in your standard kitchen oven fails: it cannot get hot enough. A 500-degree oven is indeed very hot for making most food, but pizza (and other flatbreads) are best when the outside gets a nice char and the stone you slide that onto is at a darn-near metal-melting level. That’s what you need to ensure that the layers of dough are cooked through, and some elevation is created in the dough as well, so there’s an airiness to it. The Arc gets to 800 to 900 degrees in about 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the ambient temperature. This spring, on cold nights, it took a bit longer.
We’ll add that we cooked more than pizza in the Arc, and for that, when you want a lower temperature (like for grilled veggies, or roasting chicken thighs), the Arc can be tough to keep at a cooler temperature. We learned that starting with the temperature dial at only about a third of its maximum and being patient with letting the heat come up was the best approach.
For the Arc, Gozney evolved their flue design. There’s no chimney, and that’s a good thing, because it limits ash buildup. Also, the flame climbs the ceiling of the Arc from left to right and that source of heat is recessed, maximizing the ceramic floor space of the oven. The difference between the Arc and Arc XL is that the latter is two inches deeper, able to accommodate a 16-inch pizza versus the 14 inch maximum for the standard Arc.
A stainless-steel lip at the mouth of the oven both protects the stone (because you might scrape it with a pizza peel or when sliding in a cast-iron pot or pan) and creates a precise release point for flicking a pizza dough into the mouth of the Arc. If you use one of Gozney’s turning peels (basically a downsized peel but one with a longer arm than a spatula, so you’re safely back from the heat), that metal rim gives you an ideal balancing point for the arm of the peel. Pull the front quarter of the pizza out to the mouth, use the leverage of the peel and rotate the pie in quarter turns.
While these details might feel like overkill, they’re decidedly not. If you’re a novice at making pizza at home, you’ll appreciate a flatter learning curve, and since we’ve been doing this for a while and experimenting with different doughs and methods, we immediately felt the ease of using the Arc.
If there’s one setback to the Arc, it’s that the opening size at the front will limit what you can cook. We’ve found that a spatchcocked chicken (with a foil dome in a flat cast-iron pan) works great, but that mail-slot mouth means you may have to get creative with your cookware arsenal, because some pots and pans either won’t fit or cannot handle the higher heat of a pizza oven. With some discipline and care, and paying attention to results, pizza, a quick-bread we’ve made for a while, a naan, not to mention steak, chicken, and ton of sautéed and grilled veggies, from mushrooms to peppers, grilled asparagus and onions have all come out beautifully.
We do miss the wood option, because cooking with wood produces a flavor profile that is very difficult to match. However, cooking with wood isn’t great environmentally—and your neighbors may not love all that smoke wafting by, either. The smaller scale of the Arc and its cleaner fuel are a worthy fit for a lot of people. Not to mention, because the Arc is light, you could also do a backyard takeover at a friend’s—put it in a car trunk, drive over and change their pizza perspective.
What are your thoughts?