Gozney Roccbox pizza oven review

Available from Gozney (£399)

Read our round-up of the best pizza ovens

Billed as the ‘world’s first portable restaurant-style pizza oven’, the Roccbox is the pint-sized, household equivalent of the professional pizza ovens Gozney manufactures for the hospitality industry.

Where some home pizza ovens are monolithic structures that sit permanently in your (suitably-sized) garden, ovens like the Roccbox can be moved around.

At nearly £400, it’s a big investment for a niche product – so is it worth the money?

What were your first impressions of the Gozney Roccbox?

It is easy to make sense of the Roccbox as soon as you open the box – the main body of the oven comes nestled in neat, partly recyclable packaging (there are some polystyrene panels used for protection), then there are the gas and wood attachments and two pizza peels.

The brand claims the product can be used straight from unboxing and we found this to be the case. Even if you’d never seen a pizza oven before in your life, you would be able to unpack and start cooking very quickly.

The dome-shaped body of the oven is covered in a matte silicone outer layer (available in grey or lime green) which looks smart and feels premium. Even the instruction manual – a thick, glossy booklet – is a cut above the average.

How easy is the Roccbox to assemble?

As mentioned above, one major bonus of the Roccbox is that it requires zero assembly time. The oven comes complete – all that’s required is an intuitive quick flick of the four legs to unfold them.

We referred to the manual when it came to attaching the gas. The instructions tell you to use gas the first time you use the oven and give it 30 minutes to heat (after that, it’ll only take 20-30 minutes to get up to the desired 300C cooking temperature).

We added the gas burner with help only from the photos in the manual, which despite being a hefty tome was actually quite minimalist in nature, with very clear, well-designed elements and well-defined sections, including recipes.

We set the oven up in the house and used the carry strap to move it into the garden to test its portability – it was heavier than expected but still possible to be moved by one person.

How easy is the Roccbox to use?

The design of the Roccbox is streamlined so there are no confusing elements – on the whole, we’d say it’s foolproof.

Once the gas is attached and turned on, the oven starts to heat up. We watched the in-built thermometer creep up and found with the gas at full pelt, it hit 300C in the advertised 20 minutes.

It’s worth stressing again that the manufacturer recommends heating the oven for 30 minutes on first use – we almost missed that part in the manual, and while it wouldn’t make the oven unusable if you forgot, it is something the brand explicitly tells you to do in order to ‘cure’ the oven.

If you were to encounter any difficulties using the Roccbox, in addition to the detailed manual, there are plenty of online resources available, including videos and PDF guides to fuel, should you misplace your original manual.

What fuel does the Roccbox use?

The oven we tested came with gas and wood burners. We used the same patio gas you’d use for a gas barbecue, and it attached in a very similar way.

The wood burner clips on in the same way as the gas burner and you feed in pieces of kiln-dried wood. We were excited to use the wood burner for the authentic wood-fired pizza that everyone craves from an outdoor oven, however we found the gas was far superior in terms of heat, speed and temperature control.

While we can’t say exactly how much gas was used, we found the wood burner used a lot of kindling for a very short amount of cooking time so wouldn’t score highly on the fuel efficiency front. It also lost its temperature a lot quicker when wood was used.

We found the wood instructions a little impractical, too – the manual states that the wood should be in very small, pencil sized pieces. If you've picked up a bag of standard kindling and don’t have an axe, you will have to wedge the pieces into the small hopper, which is cumbersome and dangerous, since the chamber gets very hot.

Whichever fuel you use, the oven has the capacity to reach 500C.

Update – June 2020: Since we tested the Roccbox, Gozney has removed the wood fuel option from their pizza oven while they improve it. They plan to release an updated wood burner later in 2020. Until then, Roccbox pizza ovens are purchased as single-fuel pizza ovens.

How many pizzas does it fit?

There’s only room to make one pizza at a time. The slot itself is shallow (8.4cm tall), however the cordierite stone bottom is built into the oven, so it retains heat really well and you can add another pizza straight after removing the one before, with no need for it to wait to heat up again.

How long does it take to make a pizza?

Gozney claims the Roccbox makes pizza in 60 seconds. We used the pizza peel to check the pizza after 60 seconds and found while the base was indeed cooked, it looked pale, so we put it in for around another minute until it was blistered.

How easy is it to add a pizza?

It will always take a fair bit of practice to casually flick a pizza into an oven as they do in Naples, but by pizza number 10, we had started to get the hang of it.

Roccbox have made it as simple as possible with their non-stick peel. However, the peel has holes which we found spilled flour on the floor and made the process messier than it needed to be when effective pizza peels are often just a sheet of metal.

How hot does the outside get?

One thing we really liked about the Roccbox was the fact that, despite the blistering temperature inside, the outside of the main oven remained safe to touch thanks to the calcium silicate insulation and rubberised silicone outer jacket.

This provides peace of mind when kids are around, but of course, we wouldn’t recommend touching it – the burners at the back get extremely hot.

Does it come with additional pizza tools?

The Roccbox comes with a main pizza peel for inserting your pizza dough into the oven, then a smaller 'turning' peel to allow you to do just that.

They would cost a fair amount to replace (the main peel is £65 and the turning peel £49) so do take care of them as they are made from lightweight metal.

Aside from our gripe about the holes being unnecessary and causing flour or semolina to fall through the gaps, the non-stick coating was very good and both peels were easy to handle.

What else can you cook in a Roccbox?

To us, this is a pizza oven in the truest sense – the design allows for very little else. While you could use a baking tray or shallow, all-metal pan, with only 8cm or so to play with, you are quite limited.

However, if you have the right-sized utensils to make it work, the Gozney website has recipes including baked fish, porchetta and cinnamon buns.

Is it all-weather or does it come with a cover?

The Roccbox is designed to be stored rather than left out in the garden, however a cover is available to buy for £39.99.

How easily can the Roccbox be stored?

The footprint of the Roccbox is impressively small (dimensions: 41cm x 53cm x 47cm) so it will easily store in a modestly-sized shed.

How easy is the Roccbox to carry around?

If we were to quibble, the 20kg weight may not be seen by everyone as genuinely portable. While the strong strap does make it easier to carry, it requires some strength.

However, since a piece of stone has been built into the oven, the weight makes sense – just don’t think you can swing the pizza oven over your shoulder like a handbag, despite Gozney positioning this as a gadget you’d breezily carry to friends’ houses and on camping trips.

How was the finished pizza?

The cooking results were truly impressive. We used a standard pizza dough with tomato sauce and various toppings and found the cook was consistent each time (although we fell into the trap of adding too much mozzarella cheese, which leaked when placed in the oven). The finished pizza had the style of a soft, pillowy, Neapolitan-style pizza.

There was a discernible difference between the gas and wood-fired flavours – the wood-firing did give that extra-authentic char, however the gas heated up quicker and could be left to do its work, rather than continuing to load wood during cooking. Having the two options is a big bonus but we found gas was the clear winner.

To achieve such a restaurant-standard pizza in a couple of minutes in your garden will certainly provide a talking point and make for a very fun mealtime.

Who would the Roccbox be most useful for?

Couples who will be making two or three pizzas at a time or want to invest in a gadget they can take out on special occasions.

What’s your favourite thing about the Roccbox?

That the combination of foolproof functionality and professional-standard cooked pizza makes you feel like a far more proficient dough-slinger than you actually are.

Gozney Roccbox: The verdict

The Roccbox is an expensive piece of kit but for the price you get versatility and quality. Gozney is a premium brand (the ovens come with a 5-year warranty – just make sure you register your purchase) and the build of the Roccbox lives up to this. There are no flimsy or shoddy elements to this decidedly regal piece of kit.

There’s a certain novelty value about it, which makes it entertaining to use, however the cooking results are no joke – the finished pizza is restaurant-grade, even if you are new to the art.

However, it is less portable than other small pizza ovens, like some of those by Ooni, so it will involve some effort to move it around.

But if you really like pizza and will use the oven regularly, invest in the protective cover and leave it out all summer so you can fire up the gas or wood easily – gas being our preferred fuel here – and have pizza within minutes (subject, of course, to being organised enough to leave your dough to prove for a few hours beforehand).

Gozney Roccbox pizza oven star ratings

Ease of assembly 5/5
Overall build quality 5/5
Ease of use 4/5
Packaging 4/5
Value for money 3/5
Cooking results 5/5
Ease of storage 4/5

Overall star rating: 4.2/5

Available from Gozney (£399)

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This review was last updated in May 2020. If you have any questions, suggestions for future reviews or spot anything that has changed in price or availability please get in touch at goodfoodwebsite@immediate.co.uk.