5 August 2026 · 6 min read
Your first pizza in an Ooni: the five mistakes everyone makes
A pizza oven bakes in sixty to ninety seconds. That is wonderful when everything is right and merciless when something is not — there is no time to fix anything mid-bake. Almost every first-evening problem comes back to the same five things.
1. The pizza sticks to the peel
This is by far the most common. You lay the topped pizza on the peel, slide towards the oven, and half of it stays behind.
The answer is not more flour but less time. Top the pizza in thirty seconds at most, and shake the peel once partway through to check it is still loose. A perforated peel helps considerably, because excess flour falls through instead of going damp.
Semolina instead of flour works well too: it behaves like tiny ball bearings under the dough.
2. You are baking on air temperature, not stone temperature
The air in the oven is hot within a couple of minutes. The stone is not — it needs fifteen to twenty minutes to come up to temperature all the way through.
Bake too early and the top is done while the base stays pale and floppy. Aim for four hundred to four hundred and fifty degrees of stone temperature. If your model has no built-in thermometer, an infrared gun is not a luxury.
3. Too many toppings
In an ordinary 250-degree oven a generously topped pizza survives. In a 450-degree oven it does not: the base is done before the moisture from the tomato and mozzarella has evaporated, and you are left with a wet middle.
Stick to a thin layer of sauce, mozzarella you have drained, and no more than two or three other ingredients.
4. Not turning it
Every pizza oven has a hot side — the side the flame is on. If you do not turn, one edge is black while the other is still pale.
Give the pizza a quarter turn every twenty to thirty seconds. At twelve inches the ordinary peel manages that; from sixteen inches up you want a turning peel, because otherwise you have to pull the pizza half out of the oven.
5. Dough that is too cold or too young
Dough straight from the fridge is stiff and tears as you stretch it. Take it out an hour or two beforehand.
And give it time: dough made the same day bakes indifferently. A twenty-four to forty-eight hour cold prove makes more difference to the result than any difference between the oven models.
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