Ninja Woodfire Outdoor Oven

Ninja is on a roll right now, and rightly so. Sure, they've made their way into many households via their Double Stack airfryer, which we've actually already reviewed, but their next mission seems to be to take over the patio via two key products, a grill and this - an outdoor oven.

Like the regular Woodfire grill, the Woodfire Oven is quite nice to look at, with the matte orange colour around the central handle being particularly beautiful, almost. The same handle is also sturdy, and both the small handle for wood chips on the side and the small knobs for adjusting the oven also seem to be both tactile and of high quality.

Whether the Woodfire Outdoor Oven can handle thousands of pizzas is hard to say, but at first glance, and during the test period of a couple of weeks, it's hard to find a fault with the design or the immediate physical functionality.

The oven is both relatively compact and relatively small. It weighs just 14 kilos, which really isn't much for an entire oven that has the same functionality as the one you have in your kitchen. It also comes with both a dish and a pizza stone, precisely because cooking pizzas seems to be a pretty central part of the whole pitch here. There are also several accessories included as part of the package, including two packs of smoke chips so you can smoke things with the oven yourself.

The reason we're even looking at this one is that, like so much other gear from Ninja, it's completely electric. This means it's incredibly easy to move around, and if you have an outdoor socket, it's perhaps the most hassle-free way to use an oven overhead. As soon as the power is switched on, you select a setting via the two aforementioned knobs and it can run from 40 to 370 degrees.

There are eight settings in total depending on what you want the oven to do for you, namely pizza, simmering, roasting, grilling, baking/roasting, smoking, drying and maintaining a low temperature. It's all very smooth and the only real complaint I have is that the two times I've made pizzas on the patio with the Woodfire Outdoor Oven, it took something like 20 minutes for the oven to hit the required 370 degrees.

So is the Woodfire Outdoor Oven perfect as a pizza oven? Well, it's hard to say. The door itself is quite heavy to open and close, and if it's closed, you can quickly burn the pizza because the heat isn't distributed evenly, and if it's open, it doesn't retain heat very well. To be honest, the Woodfire Outdoor Oven is intended to be a jack-of-all-trades, and to that end it delivers in a big way. Whether it's baby back ribs (insert The Office meme here) or homemade pita bread, you can pretty much always count on Ninja's product here, even if you can get more smoke flavour, better pizza ovens and other more specialised products elsewhere.

But for around £350, you get a pretty potent cooking tool that can help you in a myriad of different situations. No, it's not a smoker, nor is it an Ooni pizza oven, but boy is it capable of a lot.