Ninja appliances are everywhere at the moment, with the Ninja Creami amassing a cult following and David Beckham endorsing their range of appliances. With so much hype, you'd be forgiven for buying the Ninja Woodfire pizza oven without a second thought.
But before you buy, there are some other options to consider. We thought the oven was pretty good when we put it to the test. If you buy the oven, you'll get a fine appliance that makes fairly good pizza. However, 'pretty good' isn't the best, and for $300, you should get the very best pizza oven you can.
I think there are three other deals to consider before you take the plunge. Here's everything we found when we tested the Ninja Woodfire - and why there are other deals out there worth considering.
What's the deal with this pizza oven?
Is the pizza oven good?
This pizza oven is fine. It makes a fairly good pizza, but there's a technical detail that means that it's nowhere near the heights of an Ooni or Gozney oven.
Unlike most domestic pizza ovens, this appliance works using an electric filament. It's like a souped-up Easy-Bake oven. It can generate enough heat to cook a pizza fairly quickly.
When we tested this oven, we found that it can bake a pizza in around four minutes. That sounds impressive until you realize that that's four times longer than a wood-fired or gas-fuelled pizza oven.
That means that this pizza oven also won't puff up the crust in the same way as a gas or wood pizza oven. These ovens get twice as hot as the Ninja. The crust instantly bakes hard and fluffs up at the edges as the water in the dough evaporates into steam - this is what makes a classic pizza crust.
That reaction isn't possible in the Ninja Woodfire. It bakes the pizza dough to a consistency more like bread than pizza crust. It's fine, but it's not entirely dissimilar to baking the pizza in an oven - in which case there's no point in dropping a couple hundred dollars on the oven.
That's also true with toppings. When I tested the new Ooni Karu 2 Pro last week it did an amazing job at cooking vegetables. In just a minute, onions and courgettes on a flatbread developed a delicious char while maintaining a little juiciness. When we made a vegetarian pizza in the Ninja Woodfire, the vegetables were warmed up, but not charred, so it made for damp toppings.
This oven does have one unique feature: the smoker. Unlike other pizza ovens, this is equipped with a wood hopper to smoke meats. This is fine - it makes good joints of smoked meat. However, the hopper is tiny, so you have to keep topping it up as it cooks, unlike, say, a Traeger, which doesn't need constant attention and can hold much more meat.
In short, the oven is fine - but you can get much better appliances for around the same price.
What should you buy instead?
I think there are three deals of around the same price that are a better option than the Ninja Woodfire:
However, don't just take my word for it. Black Friday sees amazing discounts but its important to shop around. Every pizza tester in the world recommends Ooni and it can feel suspicious, so it's worth checking out Ooni alternatives. There is also a range of indoor pizza ovens to consider - and some at around the same price as this Ninja Woodfire.
