Review: Solo Stove Pi

If you have enough outdoor space to cook outside, and you live with a partner or housemate, you’ve probably had some version of the same argument I’ve had. Should we get a grill? Or a smoker? What is the best device that will get us out of the kitchen and standing in the sun, sipping the cold beverage of choice while we prepare dinner for friends and family?

I am firmly Team Pizza Oven. I like cooking with wood, and no other device lets me light a fire, pull everything out of the fridge, and have four courses ready and on the table between 5:30 and 6:15 at night. It’s almost faster than cooking inside. Solo Stove’s new Pi is an exemplar of the type. It’s made to bake pizza, but it’s almost better for cooking everything else.

If you’ve heard of Solo Stove, it’s probably because you’ve seen one of their ubiquitous high-end firepits. These polished, stainless steel tubes have a signature design, with air holes at the top and bottom and an elevated platform to place the wood. In theory, the increased airflow at the top creates a “secondary” burn which makes the fire pit almost smokeless.

In his testing, my colleague Parker Hall found that the Solo Stove got incredibly hot, which makes its transition to high-heat pizza ovens a natural one. The Pi is also made from stainless steel and has a cylindrical shape that echoes Solo Stove’s other products. A cylinder is also a markedly different shape from other pizza ovens I’ve tried, which tend to be more elongated.

The reason that most pizza ovens have an elongated shape is because they need adequate space for a big wood hopper or other fuel source in the back. The heat then travels up or down around the pizza stone to heat it up to around 800 or 900 degrees. Solo Stove did away with that design. Instead of making a big heat source at the back, its fuel attachments hug the back of the oven. They’re wider, instead of deeper.

The other design change is that because the cooking surface is circular, you can’t slide in a whole pizza stone without making the door really wide and sacrificing a lot of insulation. So instead, its cordierite pizza stone comes in two separate pieces, which slot into the oven. This made me a little nervous, but it had other advantages, which I’ll come to later.

The long, slim fuel attachments work surprisingly well. They slot in easily at the back, and the gas burner, as you might expect, was very effective. It got the oven up to 700 degrees within 20 minutes.

My expectations for the wood hopper were extremely low. It’s 4 inches deep and 11 inches wide. In my experience of both pizza ovens and basic physics, that’s not a very big space for a deep fuel base—even if it does have Solo Stove’s signature air holes punched into the bottom. I was shocked to find out that it worked. I put in a lit fire starter and 8-inch dried hardwood oak splits from my local hardware store. The oven heated up to 500 degrees within 15 minutes. 

There’s only room for one or two pieces of wood at a time, though. Don’t lose track of the detachable handle that lets you open the back door, because you’ll be opening it several times during a cooking session. Also, there is no secondary burn here—after one use, the smoke emerging from the oven's mouth blackened the top of the oven. It wipes off, but just a warning. 

The Pi is remarkably compact, especially when placed next to an enormous oven like the Gozney Roccbox. But as I cooked with it over the course of two weeks, other advantages quickly showed themselves.

First, the cooking space is 15 inches in diameter. It’s big enough to fit our 12-inch Lodge cast-iron pan, but—and this is crazy—my pan's handle sticks out. The body of the pan heats up to 600 degrees, hot enough to roast asparagus within a couple of minutes, but the handle stays relatively cool. As someone who has burned themselves through heat-resistant gloves, this is a revelation.

Second, the top is flat. This is not a feature that it would have occurred to me to request in a pizza oven, but it is a remarkably convenient and sturdy place to quickly put a burning hot pan while you quickly tong out the asparagus, put them in a serving bowl, and replace them with potatoes. This is obviously something that has occurred to Solo Stove as well, since it recently came out with a lid ($75) for its firepits.

I was also a little bit worried that there’s a noticeable split in the middle of the pizza stone—that it would be difficult to clean, or that the dough would sag or burn in the middle. It turns out that when the oven is 700 degrees (and you’ve let the stone preheat for at least an hour), pizza cooks quickly enough that it’s not a cause for concern.

Like most things involving recreation, your choice of your backyard cooking implement comes down to price and personal preferences. That’s the only quibble I have with the Pi—the option I tried is the one with swappable wood and gas attachments, which costs a cool $645 at its current presale price. That makes it a hard sell when compared to the Ooni Karu 12 ($499), which is also a pretty great, attractive, and easy-to-use oven. 

However, if you enjoy cooking with wood—and you like your dinner to be fast, hot, and on the table in half an hour—it’s hard to imagine a better, no-brainer summer buy than the wood-fired version. I work full-time and have two school-aged kids, and with a small, high-heat pizza oven, I can still have dinner cooked outside and on the table in a matter of mere minutes. I might even sip a chilled beverage while I’m at it.

UPDATE 5/26/2022: A previous version of this article stated that the Ooni Karu 12 cost $399. With the wood and gas attachments, the final price is $499.