commercial ovens

What is the best commercial oven for a high volume pizzeria?

That’s an open-ended question bound to get you a variety of answers. Let me start by mentioning that human pride often gets in the way of true open-mindedness when a large ticket item has been purchased. Most people obviously do their research prior to buying a big-ticket item like an oven. However, after using the oven, certain issues may pop up that they find aren’t to their liking, but somehow admitting that a product has flaws would undermine the intelligence of the person who bought a bad piece of equipment. Therefore, people will often say that one oven is far superior to any other simply because they’ve spent so much money on it, and suggesting any other product might be equally as good for a lesser price, would undermine their own feelings of adequacy.

Now that we’ve gone through that psychology lesson :), let’s move on. There are many people who will tell you that nothing cooks as good as a deck. Others will tell you that a conveyor oven can cook just as well. Some say it has to be wood/coal/combustible material-fired, others say gas is better than electric due to cost of fuel.

So, first decide if you want the ease of a conveyor or the bake of a deck oven. A conveyor can cook faster than a deck due to having forced heat. There are still other less-conventional ovens such as the fish carosel ovens used in Chicago and the Rotoflex oven that uses rotating decks.

Cost also matters. You can buy a used deck oven for under $3k (often well under). A new conveyor oven lists at 60k and up. A rotoflex is between 20-30k new.

If you can give us some parameters to work from, perhaps we can give you more accurate information for your purposes.