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Billy Wood offers the Italian-made XO pizza oven, a 40-inch beast that will allow you to cook up to four pizzas at one time. You’ll need a couple folks to move this beauty in, as the XO weighs in at 247 pounds. The next thing you need to decide is if you are cooking with wood or gas. True pizza snobs will tell you the wood-burning ovens offer a far more authentic taste, are generally less expensive but will take up to one hour to heat up. While there is an adjustable flume, the wood burners offer far less temperature consistency. Gas models offer more temperature control, heat up in as little as 15 minutes, but that all comes with a cost. The XO models run around $3,200 to $4,000 with a wood source and usually double for the gas model. Summer Breeze offers the Alfa One, a one-pizza oven which retails for $1,400 for wood and $2,200 for gas. A four-pizza Alfa model can run around $3,400 for wood and up to $6,500 for gas. Add anywhere from $600 to $1,000 for a base cart for the oven. If you are just getting into the outdoor pizza-making hobby, start with one of the better mass-produced onepizza models. There is an art to these ovens that takes hundreds of hours of practice to perfect. If you have the means and are fully committed to being a Level 10 pizza maker, get the bigger oven. No matter what size or quality you buy, prepare yourself for the learning curve. Each little piece of the process is like earning Boy Scout badges. Mastering rotating the pizza with a turning peel while not burning the pizza requires patience and an upfront acceptance that you will begin with some epic fails before getting an edible end product. A taste sensation that can be amortized while you become the neighborhood pizza boss? That’s something worth signing up for. 66 // H I LT O N H E A D M O N T H LY. C O M
