What Else Can You Cook in a Pizza Oven?

A pizza oven is not a pizza machine. It is a falling-temperature bread oven, and the pizzas are simply the thing you cook in the first twenty minutes of its useful life. Everything after that is free food cooked on heat you have already paid for, and it is the reason a wood-fired oven earns its place in a yard rather than sitting under a cover eleven months of the year.

The organising idea is a ladder. The oven starts at Neapolitan temperature, and over the next two to four hours it walks down through every band a domestic oven can reach and several it cannot. Each band has food that suits it. Plan the evening in that order and you get five courses out of one fire.

Heat safety: this is the hottest cooking most home kitchens ever do. Use long-handled peels and pan grabbers to place and retrieve everything, never your hands or a folded tea towel, and wear EN407 rated gloves such as Grill Armor EN407 Certified Oven Gloves, 932F Rated rather than a fabric oven mitt. Nothing with a plastic, rubber, silicone or wooden-glued handle goes into the chamber, at any temperature on this page. Burn fuel outdoors only, with clearance from fences, eaves, awnings and anything else combustible, keep children and pets outside the working arc, and never pour water on a hot stone. It flashes instantly to steam that scalds and the thermal shock cracks the stone. Fat dripping onto a 700F floor will flare, so use a pan with a rim rather than cooking meat directly on the stone.

What is the heat ladder after the pizzas?

The table below is the whole guide in one screen. Times assume a saturated stone floor and a door on the oven where it has one. In a gas oven you can hold any band you like by adjusting the burner. In a wood oven you follow the fire down, which is why the order matters more there.

Every one of those numbers is a floor temperature read with an infrared thermometer pointed at the middle of the stone, not a guess and not an air temperature from a dial. A dome thermometer on the front of an oven is reading the shell, which can sit 150F away from the surface the food is actually touching. The oven temperature by style chart covers the pizza end of the range in more detail.

What works at 800F?

The band immediately below pizza belongs to flatbreads, and it is the best-kept secret of owning a pizza oven. Pita, naan, pide, lavash and Turkish flatbreads all want exactly what a pizza wants: an extremely hot floor, a short bake and a fast turn.

Pita is the showpiece. A 100 g ball rolled to about 4 mm, launched onto an 800F stone, will inflate into a full sphere in around 45 seconds. The mechanism is simple: the outer surfaces set almost instantly, the water in the middle turns to steam with nowhere to go, and the bread blows itself apart into two layers with a pocket between. It only happens on a genuinely hot floor. In a 450F domestic oven the surface sets too slowly and the steam escapes, which is why home pita so often comes out flat.

A small round turning peel is the tool for this whole band. Flatbreads at 800F need turning in seconds rather than minutes, and a full-size launching peel cannot spin something inside a narrow chamber. Use the same peel to move charring vegetables around: whole peppers, spring onions and thick slices of halloumi all blister in 2 to 4 minutes at this temperature and go from perfect to carbon in about 30 seconds.

How do I cook steak at 650 to 700F?

This is the band people are most surprised by, and it is arguably the single best thing a pizza oven does after pizza. The chamber gives you two heat sources at once: the pan conducts into the bottom face while radiant heat off the dome browns the top face, so a steak develops crust on both sides without ever being flipped for browning alone.

1. Preheat the pan empty, in the oven, for 5 to 10 minutes. A cold pan going in with a cold steak steams the meat. The pan has to be hot before the protein touches it.
2. Dry the steak thoroughly and salt it well ahead. Surface moisture is the enemy of a crust and salting 40 minutes ahead draws it out and then reabsorbs it.
3. Steak in, 2 to 3 minutes for a 1.5 inch cut. Use tongs, and do not touch it once it is down.
4. Flip, another 2 to 3 minutes. Pull the pan forward toward the mouth if the back of the chamber is running very hot.
5. Pull at 125F internal for medium rare and rest for 8 minutes. Carryover from a sear this aggressive is real, and a steak pulled at 135F will finish somewhere near medium.

A fast instant-read probe is not optional in this band. An infrared gun reads surfaces and a steak's surface at this temperature tells you nothing about its centre. Lamb chops behave the same way but faster, roughly 90 seconds a side for a single-bone chop. Prawns, scallops and squid want the same pan and about the same heat, but come out at 90 seconds to 2 minutes total, and go rubbery within 30 seconds of that.

Cook fat in a pan with a rim, never directly on the stone. Rendered fat hitting a 700F floor flares, coats the chamber in soot, and leaves a grease stain in a porous surface that has to be burnt off afterwards.

What about 550 to 600F: chicken and vegetables?

This is the roasting band, and it lasts longer than the ones above it because it does not need the fire tended. In a gas oven, turn the burner to its lower settings and hold this range for as long as you want. In a wood oven you arrive here roughly 40 to 90 minutes after the last pizza, depending on insulation.

Bone-in chicken thighs and drumsticks are the right cut. They take 25 to 35 minutes skin up in an oiled cast iron pan, and the combination of a hot floor under the pan and radiant heat above produces skin that a domestic oven struggles to match. Rotate the pan 90 degrees every 5 minutes. Take chicken to 165F internal at the thickest point, checked with a probe rather than by colour or by clear juices, both of which are unreliable.

Boneless breast is the one cut to avoid here. The band is aggressive enough that a thin lean cut is dry before it is cooked through. Whole birds work but need a lower band, closer to 450F, and 60 to 90 minutes with regular rotation.

Vegetables are the easiest win on the entire page. Halved potatoes, wedges of onion, whole heads of garlic, thick batons of carrot, aubergine and courgette all take 12 to 20 minutes in an oiled pan at 550F, shaken twice. They come out with a char that no domestic oven produces, because a domestic oven cannot get the pan hot enough to caramelise the cut face before the inside overcooks.

How do I bake bread and focaccia at 450 to 500F?

A pizza oven with a saturated stone floor at 450F to 500F is functionally a small deck oven, which is exactly what bread wants. Two approaches, depending on what you are baking.

Focaccia goes in a pan. Oil a cast iron pan generously, press the dough out with oiled fingertips, dimple it deeply, top it and bake 18 to 25 minutes with two rotations. The oiled pan effectively shallow-fries the base while the top bakes, which is the whole point of the style. Focaccia is also the best possible use for a dough that has over-fermented and gone slack, because a pan holds a shape the gluten no longer can.

Boules and batards go on the stone. Thirty to forty minutes with the door on for a 750 g loaf. The one thing a small pizza oven cannot easily do is steam, and steam in the first ten minutes is what lets a loaf expand before the crust sets. The fix is a lidded cast iron Dutch oven for the first 20 minutes, then the lid off for the rest. The loaf makes its own steam inside the lid.

Watch the base more carefully than you would in a domestic oven. A stone that has been at 900F all evening still holds enormous heat at its core even when its surface has fallen to 480F, and a loaf can char underneath while the top is still pale. If the base is browning too fast, sit the pan or the loaf on a thin metal tray to break the direct conduction, or move it toward the mouth.

What can I bake at 350 to 400F?

Dessert, and it is worth planning for rather than treating as an afterthought, because this band arrives exactly when everyone has finished eating.

Cobblers and crumbles are the natural fit: fruit in the bottom of a cast iron pan, topping over it, 30 to 40 minutes with a rotation every 10 minutes. The residual heat in the floor caramelises the fruit sugars against the pan in a way a domestic oven does not. Baked apples take 25 to 30 minutes, a skillet brownie 20 to 25, and a tarte tatin roughly the same.

Two adjustments matter in this band. Put the door on if the oven has one, because at 375F the chamber loses heat through an open mouth faster than it is being replaced, and the pizza-facing half of the pan cooks while the outer half stalls. And rotate more often than a recipe written for a domestic oven suggests, because a fan oven is deliberately even and a pizza oven is deliberately not.

What is 250F residual heat good for?

The overnight tail. Once the fire is out and the door is on, a well-insulated oven will coast through the 250F band for hours, and that is a genuine slow-drying environment you would otherwise need a dehydrator for.

Halved cherry tomatoes on a tray, cut side up, dry down over 3 to 6 hours into something between a roasted tomato and a sun-dried one. Chillies and herbs dry in a similar window. Nuts and breadcrumbs toast in 10 to 20 minutes and want stirring once. None of this needs supervision, and all of it uses heat that would otherwise go into the sky.

Two caveats. This band is only reliable in an oven with real insulation and mass, because a thin portable shell will be at ambient temperature within about 90 minutes of the flame going out. And do not leave anything in a chamber with live embers still in the firebox: clear the coals first with a long-handled ash rake into a metal container, then put the door on. The maintenance and cleaning guide covers ash disposal properly, including why ash stays dangerous for 24 hours.

Why does everything have to go in cast iron?

Because almost nothing else survives these temperatures, and the failures are not subtle.

Nonstick coatings break down well below pizza oven temperatures and release fumes as they do. There is no nonstick pan that belongs in a 700F chamber, at any price.

Thin aluminium warps permanently and, worse, buckles suddenly while it is in there, which throws hot fat.

Glass and ceramic bakeware shatters from thermal shock. A glass dish going onto a stone that is 400F hotter than the dish is a shattering hazard, not a cooking vessel.

Anything with a plastic, rubber or silicone handle will melt, including handles marked heat resistant, because heat resistant in a domestic kitchen means 450F. Silicone grips on a pan handle come off before the pan goes in.

Cast iron and heavy carbon steel are what is left, and they are ideal rather than merely acceptable: they hold enough heat to sear rather than steam, they cannot melt or shed a coating, and they get better with use. A cast iron pizza pan doubles as the roasting vessel for most of this page, and unlike a stone it cannot crack. A lidded cast iron Dutch oven covers the bread band. Between those two you can cook every row in the table.

Season and maintain iron exactly as you would in a kitchen: a very thin film of high smoke point oil, wiped back until it looks almost dry, baked on, repeated three or four times. Pizza oven temperatures are hard on seasoning, so expect to top it up more often than you would on a hob.

How do I manage the hot spot?

Every pizza oven has one, usually nearest the burner or the coal bed, and at these temperatures it is not a minor variation. The spread across a small chamber can easily exceed 100F, which is the difference between roasted and burnt on the same pan.

Find it before you cook. Sweep the floor with an infrared thermometer in a grid: back left, back centre, back right, then the same across the middle and the front. Write the pattern down once. It does not change, and knowing it turns every subsequent cook into placement rather than luck.

Rotate on a schedule, not on memory. Ninety degrees every 3 to 4 minutes for roasting and baking. Every 20 to 30 seconds for anything in the flatbread band. Setting a repeating timer is not overkill: the failure mode is always that you got talking and missed two rotations.

Use position as a temperature control. Pulling a pan forward toward the mouth can drop its effective temperature by 100F or more without touching the burner, which is far faster than waiting for a chamber to cool. Pushing it back does the reverse.

Manage the flame in a wood oven with the fire, not the pan. Banking the coals to one side and cooking on the other is the traditional approach, and it works because it converts a direct-heat oven into a two-zone one. Clean, kiln-dried barkless oak is much easier to hold at a steady band than damp or bark-on wood, which flares and then dies. The fuel guide covers what should and should not be burned under food.

How do I plan a whole evening around the ladder?

Work down, never up. Once an oven has fallen out of a band you cannot get it back without rebuilding a fire or waiting for a gas oven to climb again, so the sequence is fixed by physics rather than preference.

1. Pizzas first, at 850F to 950F, while the floor is fully saturated.
2. Flatbreads immediately after, at 800F, using the same peel and the same rhythm.
3. Steak, chops or seafood once the floor has fallen to 650F to 700F, in a pan preheated in the chamber.
4. Chicken and vegetables at 550F to 600F, which will hold long enough to cook properly without attention.
5. Focaccia or bread at 450F to 500F, door on.
6. Cobbler or a skillet dessert at 350F to 400F, timed to come out when people want it.
7. Tomatoes, chillies or herbs left in overnight on 250F residual heat, coals cleared first.

A gas oven makes this easy, because you are choosing each band with a dial rather than chasing a fire down. A wood oven makes it more satisfying and less forgiving, and the payoff is that the long fall through the roasting and baking bands is exactly what those ovens were built to do before anyone thought of them as pizza-only. Cut and serve everything on a large wooden board rather than a plate, because a plate traps steam under a crust you just spent an evening building. If you are still choosing an oven, the pizza oven roundup is worth reading with this page in mind: insulation and stone mass are what decide whether you get four hours of ladder or ninety minutes, and an infrared thermometer is what makes any of it repeatable. The bake temperature and time calculator handles the pizza end of the same problem.