Gozney Arc XL: Two-minute review
The Gozney Arc is a pizza oven for serious pizza aficionados. Slotting into the range between the approachable Roccbox and the company’s premiere Dome series, the new Arc – and its larger sibling, the Arc XL – harness the company’s most recent learnings to make an exceptional pizza at home.
The Arc and Arc XL utilize the efficiency and ease of gas, hooking up to readily-available propane (LPG) bottles to mean you can have the oven fired up in minutes. Both the Arc and the Arc XL take longer than the Roccbox to heat up, requiring you to turn them on at least 30 minutes ahead of cooking, but they are bigger ovens and offer improved temperature stability, better flame control and allow you to cook bigger pizzas.
So while the Roccbox can bake 12-inch pizzas to perfection, if you want to make large or family-sized pizzas, then that's where the Arc and Arc XL step in. The Gozney Arc will allow you to make 14-inch pizzas – traditionally called large in the US, UK and Australia – while the family-sized Arc XL is capable of turning around generous 16-inch pizzas in minutes. Gozney sent me the Arc XL for this review.
To ensure you make the perfect pizza, the Arcs can be combined with the optional Arc Stand accessory to give you an oven at the right height. This stand can be wheeled around like a traditional barbecue and offers plenty of prep room on either side via fold-down shelves for resting tools and food.
The Arc and Arc XL both include an integrated digital thermometer, meaning there’s no guesswork required to know when your oven is the perfect temperature for cooking. They also feature a new sleek exhaust that reduces the buildup of soot that you get above the door on the Roccbox.
The elongated burners optimize internal oven space and feature a wider rolling flame that arcs across the top to help cook the toppings on your pizza perfectly every time.
All this combines to make a compact home pizza oven that can make professional-level pizza week after week, without becoming a chore.
The only thing I think that would make this a better oven is if Gozney can create a baffle door accessory to help the Arc reach heat saturation faster. And if you only plan on making pizzas occasionally, you'll get more bang for their buck with the Roccbox. However, if you entertain large groups or want to frequently make large pizzas, the Arc and Arc XL ovens are stylish, compact and reasonably priced, considering their professional pizza capabilities.
Gozney Arc XL review: Price & availability
- Gozney Arc: $699 / £600 / AU$1,200
- Gozney Arc XL: $799 / £700 / AU$1,400
The Gozney Arc and and Arc XL are more expensive than the $499 / £399 / AU$799 Roccbox, with the smaller 14-inch capable Arc costing $699 / £600 / AU$1,200 and the larger 16-inch capable Arc XL coming in at $799 / £700 / AU$1,400.
If you have an outdoor kitchen benchtop, then you’ll be able to slot the ovens in directly on top of that, but for those needing a freestanding option that can be moved to different parts of the deck, veranda or patio, then the Arc and Arc XL stand is a handy accessory for $250 / £250 / AU$350. It has enough room either side to rest a pizza or pizza peel, carries the gas cylinder and can be moved using the lockable and stable wheels.
Because both ovens come with an integrated thermometer, you can get away without needing an additional $49 / £39 / AU$69 handheld infrared temperature gun, although this can still be useful for when you’re short on time since the inside surface of the oven gets hotter faster than the built-in thermometer reads.
You will need a pizza peel to easily slide pizzas into the oven, but we weren’t sure you need the placement peels with the longer handle designed for Gozney’s bigger ovens ($99 / £75 / AU$139), you could easily get away with using the shorter handle Roccbox Turning ($65 / £49 / AU$89) and Placement Peels ($85 / £65 / AU$119). Gozney also has a couple of new Balance and Pro Placement Peels that we didn’t get an opportunity to test out, but they look to be the right size for the new Arc range and promise to offer a better feel than the current range.
If you plan to keep the oven exposed to the elements, it’s probably a good idea to cover it with the Arc or Arc XL Cover available from $50 / £50 / AU$80 or the full length Arc + Arc XL Stand Cover ($80 / £80 / AU$130).
Gozney has a great range of recipes and how-to videos freely available on its website for those keen to progress their pizza-making skills, but if you want all the best info in the one place, then it might be worth considering the recently released Pizza Volume 01 Cookbook for $35 / £25 / AU$40. I haven’t had a chance to flick through this yet, but the recipes on the website are excellent, so I would expect nothing less here.
- Value score: 4.5 / 5
Gozney Arc XL review: Specifications
The Arc and Arc XL are significantly smaller than the original Dome and Dome S1 range, weighing just 47.5 Ibs (21.5kg) and 58.5 Ibs (26.5kg) instead of the 107 lbs (48.5kg) of the gas-only Dome S1.
Gozney Arc XL review: Design and features
- Stylish
- Top vent prevents soot buildup
- Efficient internal space
While restaurant-quality performance is the trademark Gozney has built its reputation on, it’s hard to go past the importance of looking good, and Gozney’s ovens are the best-looking consumer-grade ovens around – by some margin in my opinion. And the new Arc and Arc XL don’t stray too far from this established aesthetic, borrowing the igloo shape from its original Dome siblings and continuing the bone-white coloring that would fit in any home.
The Arc series looks slightly different with a wider mouth proportion, sleek front vent and metal side strips. The steel sides on the Dome and Arc aren’t as nice as the more uniform Dome S1 units, in my opinion, but it’s a minor detail that's quickly overlooked. In addition to looking sleek, the vent at the top will prevent any soot buildup, which is an issue on the Roccbox where the cooking process leaves black streaks on the front.
What’s perhaps the biggest functional tweak however, is the lateral burner at the side of the oven. The now flat gas outlet fires a line of flames from the side of the unit which hugs the arched ceiling of the oven to stretch right across and down the far side, creating a much more even top-down heat. This has an excellent impact on performance, which I’ll talk about later, but it also occupies much less space than the circular output found on the Dome, allowing you to cook bigger pizzas in a more compact form factor. Reducing the overall internal oven space means there's less thermal mass for faster heat times, but it also allows the unit to be more compact and lightweight without losing performance.
The Arc stand looks a little bottom heavy when the arms are folded down, but there's logic in a device as hot as a pizza oven having an abundance of stability. I did wish there was somewhere to hang the larger pizza peels from as they're unlikely to fit in your home kitchen cupboard.
- Design & features score: 5 / 5
Gozney Arc XL review: Performance
- Gas is faster and easier
- Wide mouth for easy manoeuvring
- Stable temperatures for back-to-back performance
Wood-fired is obviously the gold standard when it comes to the highest quality pizza, but making a wood fire is a significantly more laborious process than firing up a gas oven, and the difference can be hard to justify when you’re only going to make a handful of pizzas in one session. Add to this the extra space you need in the oven for wood and the cost of buying pellets or the time to process compact wood cuttings, and you have an equation where gas is going to be, by far, the more preferable option for many home cooks.
Apart from it not being wood-fired, the cooking performance of the Arc XL I tested really can’t be faulted. The oven is capable of maintaining a stable 950ºF / 500ºC temperature thanks to considerable insulation and the 20mm thick cordierite stone floor that holds a generous amount of thermal mass to cook thick or thin pizza bases as quickly as the toppings.
The Arc XL I tested had a much wider mouth than what I was used to with the Roccbox, providing a lot more space for sliding in larger pizzas and making it easier to turn them without hassle. The big mouth did have the downside that the Arc XL took around 35 minutes to get to an optimal temperature to start cooking, which is 10 to 15 minutes longer than what you can get using the Roccbox. The smaller Arc takes a similar time to the XL, or even a bit longer by many reports. So if you’re hoping to cook multiple times a week that difference can start to add up, but when you consider large wood-fired pizza ovens can take the better part of a day to get to the right temperature, this distinction can seem like splitting hairs. Still, I'm hoping Gozney is working on a baffle door to cut that heat-up time down considerably.
Once the oven is ready to go, it’s impressive how much control you have over the speed that toppings cook. The gas dial allows you to leave the flame at full roll for those pizzas with more toppings needing a good sizzle, but you can also dial it right back for the classics that just need a smattering of top-down heat. All the while the thick stone base ensures the dough is cooked through in a matter of minutes. This control means that even newcomers to pizza making can easily get a feel for how to make the perfect spotty crust and evenly cooked ingredients.
The Arc XL had no issues churning out pizza after pizza for those moments when I was trying to entertain a number of guests. It’s also stable enough that you could easily put one in a beer garden and try your hand at a side hustle. The only way you could make a better pizza is with a full built-in wood-fired pizza oven… and even then you’d still have to really know what you’re doing.
- Performance score: 5 / 5
Should I buy the Gozney Arc XL?
Buy it if...
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How I tested the Gozney Arc XL
I tested the Gozney Arc XL pizza oven over a period of a couple of months, making pizzas frequently for guests, family dinners and sometimes even for my own lunch.
A stopwatch was used to measure heat-up time and an infrared thermometer was used to verify the internal thermometer’s readings. The oven was tested at various temperatures and using a range of settings to cook different toppings.
Over 40 pizzas were cooked before coming to a final conclusion for this review.
Read more about how we test.
[First reviewed June 2024]
