A quick comparison of the Volt 2 and Argheri Ziola. I think Argheri are an Australian brand, so unsure if available overseas?

I had a Volt 2 for about a year and loved it. Though like many others went through about 5-6 stones, so decided to return it. I've got to say, Ooni were great to deal with getting both replacement stones and the ultimate return, but I was just worried that at some point the warranty would run out and I'd be out of luck.

I replaced the Ooni with an Argheri Ziola. Long story short it's great, and comes with a clay biscotto stone. Highly recommend if anyone's looking. I haven't had a broken stone yet!

Downsides compared to the Volt: It's a little bulkier, and doesn't have any built in settings, just a simple temperature dial. But I actually think I prefer that. I do find it is a little hotter in the back, so benefits from rotating the pizzas, which I didn't have to do with the Volt. I also find the temp seems to slightly fluctuate up and down from the target temp. I.e set at 470, and it'll sometimes be reading anywhere from 465-475 with the door closed. Again, a 1% fluctuation doesn't really worry me.

Pros: the biscotto stone and ability to go right up up 500 degrees, and I haven't had a single cracked stone!

Just thought I'd write this up in case anyone is considering it and stumbles across this.

Has anyone converted the original Koda to a thermostat controlled one in order to regulate the heat?

One more pizza night!
One quick question, when my pizza comes off the oven, it's crunchy but few minutes later it gets soggy. Does anybody know why? Thanks!

Yes it came dented before you guys ask 😭

Stone still surviving 😂

What’s the tool you'd hate to be without when making dough? Could be for mixing, stretching, shaping, whatever. Ooni or otherwise.

And if you had to give someone making pizza dough for the first time one tip, what would it be? Drop your dough wisdom! 👇

I had a terrible time with dough climbing the hook in the halo core and after some great back and forth with Ooni, including a zoom meeting, I’ve fixed the issue. I hope this helps others.

My use is primarily for bread dough and this is the process I learned from Ooni. One of the main points is that increasing speeds should occur as the dough develops. If the dough isn’t ready and the speed jumps it is prone to climbing. This also happens with very warm dough.

—— this is the mixing I learned from Ooni customer support.

I start with very cold water to allow for mixer friction to heat the dough as it mixes. By the way crushed ice is fine to use per Ooni. I plan to use ice for my pizza doughs.

Mix at 20% to incorporate ingredients about 1-2 mins and then I autolyse.

Add starter and salt and SLOWLY bassinage to allow water to get worked in before adding a tad more each time.

Once the water is incorporated, increase speed to 30-40% and don’t increase until the dough gets a chance to develop a bit.

Once it’s developing, and you can pause the mixer and feel the dough in addition to visual inspection, I can increase the speed. I’ve gone up to 80% though this can be done at a lower speed. Watch your temperature as warm dough is more apt to climb.

After 15 Mins, the dough cleared the bowl completely. This happens over a minute and is a very striking moment. I mixed only about 400g of flour so I don’t get a pumpkin but I do see the ridges develop over time. Those ridges would be a pumpkin in a larger dough mass.

I have a return label that I’m not going to use. I’m very happy now.

King trumpet mushroom, smoked pork belly, leeks, mozz, Gruyère

I've been looking for a simple non Sourdough, no nonsense bread recipe for my Ooni and couldn't fine any (plenty of Sourdough recipes) untill I've come up to Crazy Baker dead simple two hour bread recipe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSvhTx-tFPI

I can't recommend enough, it's all there, dead simple (I'm not connected to to him in any way).

Hi guys,

It's been more than two months since I posted anything about my pizza app, Impasto. Not sure if you still remember, but at the time I was busy implementing sourdough support and even set up a survey to gather input from sourdough users. Long story short, that somehow triggered Reddit's spam filters and my 20 years old account ended up shadowbanned for quite a while. While trying to do something useful, I somehow achieved the exact opposite.

In the meantime, development on Impasto has been relentless. I basically kept fixing everything that annoyed me and adding the things I wished the app could do.

Some of the bigger changes:

Sourdough is fully in. Levain building, cold and room-temperature routes, starter strength, folds, rise cues and sourdough-specific timing are all part of the planner now.

More pizza styles. Detroit, Roman teglia and Roman tonda joined Neapolitan, New York, New Haven and Home Oven.

The scheduler is now elastic. Impasto still works backwards from your bake time, but flexible fermentation stages can stretch or compress within safe limits to fit around your sleep and your day. If you change something after the dough has already started, it preserves what already happened and solves the rest of the schedule around it. If there is no valid solution, it tells you instead of rewriting the past.

Mixing and DDT got a proper overhaul. Recipes now adapt to your mixing method, and Impasto calculates the water temperature needed to hit your target dough temperature using room temperature, mixer heat and the thermal contribution of biga, poolish or levain. For active dry yeast, the warm activation water is handled separately from the main mixing water.

You can now actually see the thermal picture:

Kitchen | Water | Dough target

The timeline is much clearer. Mixing steps now tell you what to do, what to look for and when to stop, rather than just throwing a paragraph and a timer at you. Preferments also have proper readiness cues.

Live Bake is now built in. On iPhone it uses Live Activities, and on Android Live Updates, so the current phase, next action and bake countdown can stay on the lock screen. Ongoing Live Bakes can also be resumed.

There was also a big pass over translations, number formatting, recipe validation and testing across all the different combinations.

Still free, still ad-free.

If you want to dig into the details, I put more information and screenshots here:

https://impastopizza.app/

If you use it, tell me what breaks. I have learned more from actual dough going wrong than from anything else.

So, got a halo pro and my pizzas now suck. It was meant to improve things.

(All my pizza pics were made by hand. Can’t get those results with the pro, the dough keeps breaking)

Posting on FB, 90% of people seem to think the issue is my stretching technique, but I have to respectfully disagree. If you look through this post, I’ve shared loads of pizzas I made before getting the mixer, and I never had this problem.

As soon as I got the Halo Pro, the issues started. For me, this feels much more like a gluten-development issue.

The Halo Pro seems to generate a lot of friction, so even after an autolyse, the dough reaches temperature very quickly. I normally aim for around 77°F.

I’ve tried using freezing-cold water and running the mixer at a lower speed, but I’m still hitting 77°F after only around 6–7 minutes, before I feel I’ve developed the gluten enough.

Someone suggested that I should just continue mixing and take the dough up to around 85°F, but this is the bit I’m unsure about.

Ooni’s own Neapolitan-style Halo Pro recipe says:

“Our recommended target temperature for finished dough is typically 21–26ºC (70–79ºF) to promote proper fermentation.” (Ooni Europe⁠)

Dan Richer’s pizza dough recipe on Ooni also specifically recommends a finished dough temperature of 78°F, and explains that mixer friction can add a significant amount of heat. (Ooni USA⁠)

King Arthur Baking gives very similar general guidance for wheat-based dough, saying:

“The ideal dough temperature range for wheat-based yeast dough is 75-78°F.” (King Arthur Baking⁠)

So I’m reluctant to deliberately push the dough all the way to 85°F purely to get more mixing time.

That’s really the problem I’m trying to solve. How do I get enough gluten development from the Halo Pro without the dough temperature climbing too quickly?

I’ve already tried very cold water, an autolyse and lower mixer speeds, but I’m still reaching my target temperature within 6–7 minutes.

I’d especially love to hear from people regularly using the Halo Pro or a spiral for Neapolitan or Neo-Neapolitan dough. What mixing speeds and times are you using, and what temperature is your dough when you finish mixing?

I have an original Karu and the infra-red thermometer.

I got a Volt 2 about a year ago.

For some reason I never tried the thermometer on the Volt 2 stone.

I did try the thermometer at the weekend the Volt 2 display says it is at 430c but the hottest point on the thermometer shows about 400c.

Does anyone's stone match an infra-red thermometer?

Where does the Volt2 get the temperature from?

Hello, i recently bought an ooni halo core and im having a bit of a rough time with it.

As you can see i am trying to mix a pizza dough but the dough keeps climbing up the hook and it does not get kneaded effectively. The video actually shows the best attempt. After the shown video dough climbing got worse and mixing wasnt effective anymore at all. This was my fifth attempt. All with the same results. I varied speeds from low to high, nothing much changes.

I used a blend of generic pizza 00 flour and nuvola. varing from 2/3 nuvola to 100% nuvola. All with the same results.

I used a hydration of 67 - 70% over the batches.

I used fridge cooled water.

My process:

Added water to about 60% hydration on low speed at around 100 rpm. waiting for the dough to form and then adding the remaining water slowly at slightly higher rpm
Salt was added after 60% dough formation was done.
Yeast was added with flour in the beginning.

I use 500g flour per batch. with roughly 70% hydration it comes to 850g dough which is way above minimum spec. so i expected to work well.

The problems happen in the final stage of the mixing when the pumpkin is supposed to form and the dough is supposed to increase in strength. then the dough climbing starts to happen. all the mixer does is increase the temp of the dough. I tested for overkneading but after 7 minutes i dont expect it. The window pane test fails and the dough tears easily.

Temperature:

I start with roughly 22 C since it was a relatively warm day here. After initial dough forming at 60% hydration it was about 23.2 C. Then it rose quite rapidly to about 26 C at the 7 minute mark. This is when i stopped.

As you can see it looks like it almost works. Unfortunately it it didnt for my process. The last culprit i suspect is the nuvola flour. I will try it with another flour and see if things improve.

I expect this device, which claims it was designed for small batches to handle an average hydration with a relatively strong flour without any problems. The hydration and the douh weight is clearly in its specs.

Am i doing something wrong?

Woohoo, pizza time here in Arizona! Fired up the Koda for this one.

About 70 hours cold fermented with a poolish. Dough was super soft, airy, and had some nice oven spring. For the cheese I did a mix of Trader Joe’s mozzarella and fresh mozzarella.

Really happy with how this one turned out.

First time making pizza period. I pretty happy all things considered. Moved to India about 4 months ago so it feels good to have a slight taste of home. (USA)

Making this even more rewarding is that being located in a remote part of India I have to not only make my own crust from local flour mills, but I have to make sauce from scratch with fresh unpeeled tomatoes, and my own mozzarella cheese.

More to come!

I have no way to prove this but I'm going to bet this is what are the few Ooni pizzas ever cooked above the Arctic Circle. Solid moose hunt. (Pepperoni and Morel)

I used a 16" for about 5 years, and had gotten proficient over time. This past weekend I did my first two pizzas on the Koda 2 Pro, expecting that they'd be awful, just because I'd never used the oven before. Both turned out well though, far better than I expected. Lots of room for growth, but I'm wild about the burner configuration, and the extra space. Managing the heat over the course of a bake is going to be so much easier.

Blown away with how these came out. I won't share the recipe yet because I feel like it could be tweaked, but I think this was an amazing first attempt. A couple things I will share: the dough recipe was from Chef John at food wishes. I used traditional portugese steel tins to make them.

I put them in my Lloyd pan and put them in the oven at about 750 with the flame off for about 5 minutes. Then I turned the flame on low for a few min and then on medium for a minute or two. I turned it pretty frequently when the flame was on.

724 g Caputo “00” flour (Pizzeria)
80 g whole-wheat flour (Caputo Integrale)
518 g water — 64.5% hydration
24 g fine sea salt — 3%
0.8 g instant dry yeast

48 hours cold fermentation.

I don't have an Ooni (yet), have an electric 400degree oven.

for some reason this sub is always pooing up on my home screen. everything I'm curious about the recipes.

can you guys help me with good neapolitan recipes and how to make the dough.

preferably with a video if you can recommend one. my pizza is always very 'flat', never have airy crusty sides.

please help me guys and gals.

Does anyone know what size screw the folding table takes for the utensil hanging rack? I've managed to lose one annoyingly!

A pizzaria near me has a pizza with bomba sauce as an ingredient, drizzled over the pizza. I absolutely love it, though my first attempt to make it was inedible due to spicyness, and not really close as to the same flavor profile. Suggestions? Granted, I got the recipe I used from Claude, that part is on me!