OXO Good Grips 4-Inch Pizza Wheel Review

The verdict

Buy it, if you cut on a board and you want to stop thinking about this. The OXO 4-inch wheel is the cheapest competent cutter we rank, the 4-inch diameter is a real functional advantage over the 2.5-inch wheel most households own, and OXO stand behind it with a lifetime guarantee. Two conditions attach, and both matter: make sure you are buying the stainless 4-inch wheel rather than OXO's separate non-stick-bladed one, and do not use it on a stone or a seasoned steel.

It ranks third on our cutter roundup, behind the Scizza and the rocker. This page is about whether it is the right third - what the published specification actually commits to, and where it quietly does not.

What this review is

We have not cut a year of pizza with this wheel. What follows is its published specification, drawn from OXO's own product page and from retailer listings where OXO publishes nothing, plus the arithmetic and the surface-compatibility reasoning that specification implies. Where two published sources disagree we say so rather than picking the flattering one. The method is on the methodology page.

The published specification

Two things in that table are worth more than the rest. The weight is published twice and the two figures differ by about 18 percent - 284 g against 335 g - which on a hand tool is the difference between listings describing different revisions and one of them simply being wrong. We quote both and we are not going to average them into a number nobody published.

The empty cells are the more useful finding. There is no published replacement wheel and no published sharpening guidance, which puts this firmly in the consumable category - the full argument, including what commercial kitchens do instead, is in can you sharpen a pizza cutter. And there is no published temperature limit, which is the specification you would want before touching a 500 F stone with it.

The variant trap, which is the single most useful thing on this page

OXO sell more than one pizza wheel and the listings look nearly identical in a search result. There is the 4-inch stainless Good Grips wheel reviewed here; there is a smaller 3.5-inch SoftWorks non-stick wheel; and there is a separate wheel OXO describe for non-stick pans, whose blade is coated so melted cheese does not stick to it.

Buy the 4-inch stainless one. The non-stick-bladed version exists to protect a non-stick pan's coating, which is a real problem if you bake in a coated pan and an irrelevance if you cut on a board. What a coating costs you is edge life: a coated blade cannot be honed and the coating is the first thing to go. The 3.5-inch version simply gives up the diameter, which is the one thing this cutter is for.

Check the model number on the listing you are about to buy. The US item is 11300900G, which replaced the earlier 26681; the Australian listing is 48152.

What four inches of diameter actually buys

This is the whole case for the product, and it is geometric rather than metallurgical. A rolling wheel has to climb onto whatever it meets. The steeper the approach angle, the more the wheel wants to skid and push the topping ahead of it rather than cut through. A larger wheel meets the same obstacle at a shallower angle.

In practice that is the difference between rolling over the raised cornicione of a deep-crust or Sicilian pizza and stalling on it, having to lift off and start the cut again from the other side. Every retailer listing makes the same claim - large enough for Sicilian and thick-crust pizza - and it is the one marketing claim in the category that follows directly from the shape.

Where it is the wrong tool, in its own words

OXO publish no temperature limit for the wheel, which is a gap rather than a permission. Our position across the site is unchanged: a wheel drags a hardened edge across whatever sits under the pizza, and on unglazed cordierite that scores the surface and leaves gray metal marks, while on a seasoned steel it drags through the oil film you maintain. The one exception we have found is a maker who explicitly invites cutting on the surface, covered in the Emile Henry review.

The second limitation is intrinsic to the shape rather than the brand. A wheel cuts by rolling across the pizza, so it pushes toppings toward the far side of every cut. On a heavily loaded pizza that is visible in the finished slices. A rocker presses straight down through the whole line at once and does not - the shape comparison is in rocker vs wheel.

The third is the axle. The rolling joint traps cheese, and a wheel that no longer spins freely tears rather than cuts. Dishwasher safe helps, but a dishwasher cycle does not reliably clear a packed axle; a brush does.

Scores, and what each one is measuring

Our scores for this cutter are 3.5 for surface safety, 7.8 for cut quality, 5.5 for topping displacement and 9.4 for value, giving 7.6 overall. The surface-safety figure is the lowest of the three cutters we rank and it is not a criticism of build quality - it is the rolling-hardened-edge problem above, and it applies to every wheel ever made. The value figure is the highest of the three and is doing most of the work in the total.

Read those two together and you have the product: the best cutter here for anyone whose habit is a board, and the worst of the three for anyone whose habit is cutting in place.

Buy it, or buy one of these instead

Best for a board-cutting household on a budget: the OXO itself. Buy it if you cut on a board or a cooled surface, you want a tool that disappears into a drawer and a lifetime guarantee behind it, and your pizza is not loaded so heavily that drag is the thing you notice. It is the default for a reason.

Best for whole pizzas and heavy toppings: the Checkered Chef 14-inch rocker. Buy it instead if you cut whole pizzas on a board and toppings staying where you put them matters to you. One press per cut, no drag, and a straight edge you can genuinely sharpen for years - with the trade that it needs a board, a dry hand and 14 inches of storage.

Best for anyone who cuts in place: the Dreamfarm Scizza. Buy it instead if your habit is cutting on the stone or in the pan. Scissors lift as they cut, so nothing hardened is dragged across a hot surface. It is the most expensive of the three and the fiddliest to clean.

Do not buy any of them expecting to sharpen a wheel back to new. That is the subject of its own page, and the short version is that the trade replaces wheels and consumer wheels have none to replace.