Here are a few things to keep in mind when looking at ovens.
The longer a pizza bakes (within reason) the more flavor it develops. Ever wonder why those artisan bread shops bake their breads so long? Before settling on an oven, you must first look at your “product concept” what kind of pizza are you making? What is your product concept? By this I mean, is it a somewhat sparse topped New York style, or is it a fully loaded pizza that is piled high with veggies and meats? Then, what is your store Concept? Are you a slce operation, do you need to turn pizzas fast, are you a dine-in where people can watch you make their pizza? You get the picture. If you are going to have a lot of veggies on the pizza, an air impingement oven might be your best choice because it manages the moisture released from all of those cooking vegetables much better than other oven types. If you have a pizza loaded with different meats, the air impingement oven will do a better job of cooking all of the meat toppings than other oven types. If you have a more traditional topped pizza, or a New York style, just about any good pizza oven will work for you, but now you wil lneed to look at the capacity (pizzas per hour). Deck ovens are great, they offer a certain showmanship because your customers can watch you peel the pizzas in and out of the oven, but they are slower than air impingement ovens when you’re really cranking. If you’re into the artisan pizzas or really into hand crafting of your pizzas, a stone hearth oven might be in your future. With regard to the older design air impingement V/S the newer designs, the newer, high efficiency ovens, both designs will do an excellent job of managing water from the vegetable toppings, and when combined with the new, Hearth Bake Disks, both will give an excellent hearth baked characteristic to your pizzas. The new ovens, are a bit more flexible in that they can bake a wider assortment of pizzas at the same setting (like some thick and thin crust pizzas side by side), and they do it more economically (something you should look into whit hte cost of energy today), some oven manufacturers are reporting a cost saving of several hundred dollars in operational costs per month, which can add up pretty fast.
Tom Lehmann/The Dough Doctor