Commercial electric and gas pizza ovens: how to choose the best one for your business

To choose the best commercial oven for cooking pizza, it’s essential to understand the differences between the main types of ovens and how technological advancements have transformed their performance over time.

Let’s start with the classic wood-fired oven. As the name suggests, it uses the combustion of wood to reach high temperatures and radiate heat, offering limited control over the cooking process. With technological advancement, the static oven was introduced, which gradually heats the chamber using two electric elements, one at the top and one at the bottom of the oven.

Next came convection ovens, which improved heat distribution through a fan, ensuring more even cooking. Some businesses use convection ovens with impingement systems, typically found in speed ovens or conveyor ovens, which blow hot air at high speeds onto the food for quick cooking—though often at the expense of product quality.

Finally, the combi oven represents the latest innovation, integrating static, convection, grilling, and steaming cooking methods, providing maximum versatility and precision for optimal results in any type of preparation.

Advanced combi oven technology can make a real difference in many professional kitchens, especially when a business offers more than just a pizza menu. Let’s explore their unique advantages.

Precise control of temperature, humidity, and ventilation

The combi oven allows for extremely precise control of temperature, humidity, and ventilation, ensuring consistent, high-quality cooking results. With a preheating time of under five minutes, it easily reaches high temperatures and maintains them consistently, regardless of how many times the door is opened. This feature can streamline kitchen work by reducing manual operations and eliminating the need for constant monitoring of the oven. A significant advantage for kitchens with limited staff or businesses looking to expand their menu.

More compact dimensions

Space in the kitchen is often limited and precious. Both electric and gas combi ovens can take up to 75% less space than wood-fired ovens and do not require special hoods or chimneys for managing smoke and heat. This makes them ideal for kitchens that do not exclusively focus on pizza while still allowing for a wide variety of different dishes and ingredients.

Versatility in cooking

As mentioned earlier, one of the greatest advantages of commercial combi ovens is the ability to cook not only pizzas but also other ingredients or dishes on the menu. The cooking chambers of combi ovens are designed to provide precise control over cooking conditions, allowing for the simultaneous preparation of different dishes without compromising quality. This also makes it easier to handle special pizza doughs, such as gluten-free, without the risk of cross-contamination.

Easy to clean and use

Thanks to modern automatic washing technologies integrated into combi ovens, staff no longer need to spend valuable time cleaning the oven after service. Simply start the cleaning program from the control panel, and the oven will clean itself, returning to a sparkling state and ready for the next use.

Consistent results

Once you’ve set the cooking parameters for the desired result, the smart technologies in combi ovens allow you to save these settings for perfect consistency every time. This ensures that your customers will always enjoy the same high-quality pizza when they visit. Additionally, the intelligent features help avoid common mistakes, such as burnt pizzas, which may occur when less experienced staff are in charge.

Increased safety

Combi ovens offer a significant advantage in terms of safety, as they eliminate the need to manage open flames, as is required with traditional wood-fired ovens while cooking pizza. This drastically reduces the risk of fires and accidental burns, which are common concerns in kitchens dealing with high temperatures and live flames.

Energy savings and environmental impact

Combi ovens are designed to optimise energy use during cooking, thanks to efficient heating systems and advanced insulation mechanisms. In contrast, conveyor ovens, used for pizza, with impingement systems tend to disperse more heat, and wood-fired ovens require a constant supply of wood and manual control to maintain temperature, leading to higher energy consumption and a greater environmental impact.

Between an electric commercial oven and a gas one, which is the best for cooking pizza? In the previous section, we discussed the main advantages of a combi oven, concluding with a focus on energy consumption. This is one of the reasons why the electric oven remains the most popular choice. However, it’s not the only reason. While today’s technologies allow for quality performance in both cases, choosing a professional electric pizza oven can be crucial for reducing your environmental impact and enhancing safety in the kitchen.

Making a difference in the foodservice world means not only creating high-performance products in terms of quality, but also committing to minimising equipment consumption and reducing environmental impact during use. From the insulating materials used to design our ovens, to intelligent functions like SMART.Energy which provides useful suggestions for reducing both energy and water waste, features like these have made us leaders in the number of ENERGY STAR® certified professional ovens over time.

To clear up any doubts, we invite you to read this article where we compare gas and electric ovens, highlighting the differences and advantages of each.

Which combi oven should a restaurant choose for cooking pizza? Many restaurants have diverse menus that, in addition to including appetizers, first and second courses, also offer a wide selection of pizzas. How can you manage kitchen service effectively to ensure that customers are not only satisfied but also motivated to return? As mentioned earlier, consistently providing quality and speed is essential. This is where the cutting-edge technologies of our CHEFTOP MIND.Maps™ combi ovens excel, making them perfect for sectors like catering and gastronomy.

For example, their intelligent features ADAPTIVE.Cooking™ and MULTI.Time allow you to store over 300 customisable programs and manage up to 10 cooking processes simultaneously in the same load. No matter how many times the chef opens the oven door, the cooking times will always be recalculated.

This way, the chef can not only prepare multiple dishes but also cook, for instance, the ingredients needed for the pizza. Our ovens can grill, fry, roast, sear, smoke, steam, and much more.

Do you have limited space? No problem! You can choose from a wide range of ovens that offer different sizes to fit any type of kitchen: from 5-tray, 6-tray, 7-tray, and 10-tray ovens to our smaller COMPACT models.

Which commercial oven should you choose for pizza if you're a bakery? If your offerings are more focused on baking and pastry, you might find the most suitable option in our BAKERTOP MIND.Maps™ range of combi ovens. These are also available in different sizes and equipped with technologies that ensure precise management of temperature and humidity levels in the chamber to guarantee impeccable and uniform results.

From CLIMALUX™, which can measure humidity levels and control steam input and moisture extraction, to AIR.Maxi™, which uses multiple reversing fans with four speeds for uniform results on every tray in every application.

What if you’re not looking to cook pizzas but to reheat them instead? We’ve designed a commercial pizza oven that’s perfect for bars, fast-food restaurants, fast-casual dining, and convenience stores. Often in this sector, speed ovens with impingement systems are used to accelerate pizza preparation by utilising high-speed hot air jets. However, this type of oven does not guarantee a high level of quality and control in cooking, not to mention the extensive maintenance required. These machines often tend to break down easily. Choosing one of our speed ovens can prove to be not only a safer and more durable investment but also allows for fast service without compromising the quality of the dishes.

Our SPEED.Pro™ is the first professional oven capable of combining convection and microwave cooking in a single machine. With a compact size and elegant design, it's ideal for a bar countertop, offering versatile and rapid performance—hyper-accelerated, in fact. For example, in just a minute and a half, SPEED.Pro™ can simultaneously make toast, toast a sandwich, bake a flatbread, and a pizza! Speed isn’t just about performance; it also relates to the ease of use of this machine, thanks to its simple, intuitive interface and a library of hundreds of integrated cooking programmes.

For a more technologically advanced experience, we offer the one of a kind SPEED-X™. The first combi speed oven equipped with automatic cleaning, perfect for optimizing service times in the kitchen. In just one minute, it can reheat an entire pizza! And at the end of service, the staff won't need to waste time cleaning the oven manually. They simply need to start the automatic cleaning program suggested by SENSE.Klean, the smart sensor capable of detecting the level of dirt and calculating the most suitable cleaning mode to avoid waste.

We have established that by choosing Unox commercial combi ovens for pizza, you can achieve high-quality results while saving on space and time. But that’s not all.

Do you want to know more about our ovens or ask us a question? Don’t hesitate to reach out or book an Individual Cooking Experience to test our oven technologies in your kitchen for free. Only then will you know if our solutions are right for you!