Ooni 14-Inch Perforated Pizza Peel Review

What this review is

We have not launched a pizza off this peel, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What follows is every figure Ooni publishes for it, what those figures do and do not predict about the launch, and where two cheaper or different peels beat it. The method is on the methodology page.

The published specification

Three of those rows are the whole product. The weight, the taper and the holes. Everything else is packaging.

610 grams is the number that matters

A launch is a controlled movement made at the end of a 27-inch lever, usually in a hurry, often into a hot opening. The lighter the blade, the less the far end wanders while you are doing it.

For comparison, Ooni's own solid 14-inch blade is 1.5 lb (680 g) - about 11 percent heavier for the same footprint, because it has no holes cut out of it. That is not a large difference on a kitchen scale and it is a real one at arm's length.

What the perforations actually do

Loose flour and semolina under the base are what make a launch work: they roll, and the pizza slides. The problem is that most of that flour wants to travel into the oven with the pizza, where it sits on a 500 F stone and burns. A perforated blade drops a large part of it before it ever reaches the surface.

What you pay for that is cleaning. Dough scraps push into the holes and dry there, and a brush is the honest answer rather than a rinse. The full trade, including when a solid blade is the better tool, is in perforated versus solid.

The tapered edge

Ooni publishes a tapered leading edge, and this is the specification that separates a peel from a flat sheet of metal. A blunt edge does not slide under a dressed base - it pushes it, and a pushed base folds. The taper is also why a metal peel can retrieve a baked pizza from a stone, which a thick wooden board cannot do without lifting the crust.

Two things it is bad at

Building a pizza on. This is the failure people blame on the peel and it is a material property. Dough sitting on aluminum sweats, the moisture wets the flour underneath, and within a couple of minutes the base is glued down. Build on wood or on parchment and transfer, or dress fast and launch inside a minute. It is the single most common way a good peel produces a bad launch.

Storage. Twenty-seven and a half inches does not go in a drawer. It hangs, or it leans, or it lives on top of the fridge. Worth knowing before you buy rather than after.

Who should buy something else

If you build slowly, buy a wooden or composite board to build and launch from, and keep metal for retrieving. The Epicurean composite board is the one we would pick for that - wood versus metal sets out why the two materials are different tools rather than competing ones.

If storage is the binding constraint, the Chef Pomodoro perforated 12 x 14 has a foldable handle, which solves the one problem the Ooni cannot.

If excess flour is not your problem - you use semolina sparingly and your launches are clean - the solid Ooni 14 is stiffer, has nothing to clean out, and retrieves slightly better.

If your oven or your pizzas are small, the 12-inch version is lighter and shorter. Sizing rules are in the peel size guide.

The verdict

If you are buying one peel for a domestic oven, this is the one we would buy: light enough to control, wide enough for anything a home oven bakes, tapered enough to get under a base, and perforated enough to keep most of the loose flour out of the oven. It is not a peel to build on, and it is not a peel that fits in a drawer. Neither of those is a defect - they are what a launching tool is.