- Gas fuelled
- Reaches 500C and cooks pizza in 60 seconds
- 48cm x 56cm x 34cm
- Optional stand (£249.99) and booster (£99.99) available
- 26.5kg
Tested at home by Kulwinder Rai
At 21.5kg, the Arc XL is less than half the weight of Gozney’s flagship Dome but I’d still hesitate before hauling this off to a countryside picnic. Better to view it instead as a static oven, intended to be part of an outdoors kitchen, placed on a prep table (there’s a booster available to raise it off the surface), or mounted atop the optional wheeled Arc XL stand.
The Arc XL arrives mostly complete, but the stand (an expensive but recommended add-on) does require some assembly. Thankfully, the instructions are clear and putting it together is untaxing – I managed it in 40 minutes.
Inside the Arc XL’s well-finished, dual-layer insulated shell is what Gozney calls a ‘lateral rolling flame burner’, designed to emulate the way a wood-burner works and distribute heat in a more even and consistent manner. I say ‘more even’ but the burner itself is physically located on the left of the oven so you’ll still need to turn the pizza manually to get an even cook (the removable 20mm thick cordierite stone doesn’t rotate).
At the top front of the oven, there’s a well-positioned flue vent, while lower down is a gas control knob, alongside a snazzy battery-powered LCD display that tells you the stone’s temperature. The mouth of the oven itself is pleasingly wide, offering plenty of room to turn pizzas, as well as making it viable to cook other food, such as steak, fish and vegetables.
The recommended temperature range, depending on the type of pizza you want to cook, is between 320C and 480C, but I found maintaining a stable temperature at the upper end of the range slightly trickier. In the event, hovering around 370C – 400C (New York/Roman style pizzas) worked better for me and, happily, also meant the oven could reach its working temperature quicker, in about 35 minutes.
We knocked out seven 8in/10in pepperoni and margherita types over the space of half an hour, and, judging by the appreciative munching, the family were consistently delighted by the results. Bases were crisp, edges fluffy and leopard-spotted, while the excellent level of visibility into the oven meant I could easily see when I needed to turn pizzas to stop things getting overdone (I even managed the feat with a standard 12in peel, as opposed to a turning type).
While it’s true that, being gas-powered, you do miss out on the smoke-infused aroma that invariably comes when cooking in a wood-fired oven, that’s a shortcoming I can live with here: the enhanced controllability and ease of use are tempting compensations. This is about as good an example of a premium, gas-powered pizza oven as you’re likely to find.
