At a glance
Expert’s Rating
Pros
- Multifunctional cooking
- Integral smoker
- 370°C/ 700°F high-heat roasting
- Stone for pizza making
Cons
- Limited capacity
- Needs preheating
- Can be pricey with accessories
Our Verdict
Time, weather and maintenance can be a deterrent to cooking outside, yet Ninja’s Woodfire Electric Outdoor Oven effectively removes those barriers. Its programmes take the guesswork out of creating brilliant results, while being electric means no monitoring to check a flame hasn’t been extinguished. For what it offers, it’s pretty affordable: although once you bolt on practical accessories, such as a stand and cover, its cost increases.
Price When Reviewed
$399.99
Best Prices Today: Ninja Woodfire Electric Outdoor Oven
$349.99
There’s a reason why we love cooking outside: the ability to indulge in high heat and not worry about a little smoke means you can make the kinds of flavour-packed meals that your inside oven can’t.
Yet while cooler days often herald the end of barbecue season, Ninja’s Woodfire Electric Outdoor Oven has been designed so you can carry on enjoying your favourite foods all year round. Functioning as a pizza oven, high-heat roaster, and barbecue smoker, it’s a simple plug-and-play appliance, turning out succulent meats, artisan-style pizza and even brownies, all with an optional smoky taste.
Design & Build
- 38x45x54cm/ 15×17.7x21in
- Wood pellets for smoky flavour
- Maximum temperature of 370°C/ 400°F
The Woodfire Electric Outdoor Oven has much in common with your oven indoors: a sprung drop-down door with a long handle across the top, metal casing, dials and buttons for setting the time and temperature and inside, elements at the top and bottom. Where it differs is significant, though. For starters, it’s smaller: just 38cm tall (15 inches), with a width of 45cm (17.7 inches) and depth of 54cm (21 inches), giving it a compact cavity inside.
It’s also portable, although at 22kg (48.5lbs), you may not want to move it around that often. It stands on two chunky black plastic legs, front and back, although it’s advisable to raise it up on a heatproof table or invest in Ninja’s height-adjustable stand for practicality.
As an outdoor oven, it can generate higher temperatures, with a range of up to 370°C/ 400°F, yet dips as low as 40°C/ 100°F for dehydrating.
However, it’s the smoker box that’s the biggest difference: positioned at one side, it can be filled with wood pellets that are ignited to provide a smoky taste rather than heat. Not only does this mean you can swap flavours around easily, one pack of pellets will do for several cooking sessions.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
Performance & Features
- 8 cooking modes
- Time and temperature adjustable
- Maximum cooking size 3kg
Like many of Ninja’s small appliances, it’s the Woodfire Electric Outdoor Oven’s programmes that are the game-changer. There are eight functions to choose from, including pizza (divided into options such as calzone, thin crust and deep pan), two roasting functions for smaller cuts and larger joints, bake, smoker, dehydrate and even one for keeping food warm. Each has a preset, but also the ability to be toggled in time and temperature, so you can adjust it to suit what you’re cooking.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
There’s plenty of guidance to the programmes, alongside recipes, but it can still be tricky to set at first. For example, it’s easy to confuse max roast and gourmet roast if you’re flipping back and forward between the pages of the recipe book and cooking tables. It would be useful if there was an option for a whole chicken, or joint of beef, rather than trying to remember which programme is best suited. Fortunately, both time and temperature can be adjusted once it’s started, so even if you’ve chosen a setting incorrectly, it’s easily remedied.
The space inside isn’t huge – you wouldn’t be able to squeeze your Christmas turkey in here – but it should suffice for most meats, fish and poultry: the maximum size for a chicken is 3kg. The bird we roasted was just over that size, meaning that its legs grazed the upper element going in. We chose the Gourmet Roast programme: an automatic two-step setting that used a short burst of high heat to sear the skin before dropping to a lower heat to cook the chicken through, while using wood pellets for a smoky flavour.
It preheated in about 5 minutes, and once we’d added the chicken and set it to start cooking, all we had to do was wait for it to finish. Halfway through, we checked on its progress. Opening the door released a huge amount of smoke and steam – so it’s worth taking a step back before having a look at your food. The finished chicken was beautifully roasted: tender, with a delicious smoky flavour, golden skin with sear marks, and perfectly cooked throughout.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
The oven comes with a few different accessories: a tray with a rack for roasting, which we used for the chicken, as well as a pizza stone (31 x 32cm). It’s large enough to fit a 12-inch pizza comfortably, although the oven isn’t supplied with a peel. The pizza stone heated up in 10 minutes and we cooked identical pizzas using different options on the pizza setting: one Artisan, and one thin crust.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
The first was a rapid high-heat setting, with the second a slower cook at a lower temperature. We had more success with the latter – this emerged with the cheese melted and well-browned on top and around the crust, while the Artisan had burned at the edges, suggesting that less cooking time was required.
Rachel Ogden / Foundry
Clean-up was fairly minimal: the pizza stone only needed a scrape, and the rack and accessory frame are dishwasher safe. This means that the only part that required hand washing was the tray.
Price & Availability
In the UK, the Ninja Woodfire Electric Outdoor Oven is priced at £349.99 and it’s available for that sum from John Lewis or direct from Ninja. At the time of writing, it’s a pricier £399 from Amazon.
Buy it with the stand and cover from Ninja, however, and the price rises to a steep £529.97.
If you’re based in the US, you can buy the oven for $399.99 from Ninja, but there are better deals to be had from Walmart and Best Buy, where you can save $50, and Amazon, where you can get 30% off for a limited time. The bundle with stand and cover costs $499.99 from Ninja.
The oven itself is by no means a cheap cooking option but when compared with a dedicated outdoor pizza oven – and given its versatility – it’s well priced. But if what you’re after is an electric outdoor oven that will impart a smoky flavour to food, have a look at the more budget-friendly Ninja Woodfire Electric Barbecue Grill and Smoker.
Should you buy the Ninja Electric Outdoor Oven?
For anyone who’s struggled to use a pizza oven or barbecue without a temperature gauge (or even with one), the kind of precision cooking that the Woodfire Electric Outdoor Oven offers is sure to appeal. There’s no worry of burning or undercooking food, or the inconvenience of lighting and monitoring a flame.
Compared to some pizza ovens and barbecues, it’s more user-friendly, more convenient, and you don’t have to make sure you have fuel at hand. It produces great results, and possibly more important, consistently so.
It’s not one for the barbecue purists and passionate pizzaioli, who will miss a visible flame and the skill it takes to cook with one, but for everyone else, Ninja’s Woodfire Electric Outdoor Oven means you won’t have to wait til summer for delicious smoky flavours and homemade pizzas.