ON TEST: Pizza ovens

Boost your al-fresco menu with the latest range in pizza ovens, says Kay Maguire

- Kay Maguire

Eating outside in the garden is one of the joys of summer and although cooking on a barbecue has been the traditional way to entertain outdoors, it's now easy to create delicious pizza in your garden too, thanks to a thriving market in freestanding pizza ovens.

Perfect for placing on top of a picnic table, portable pizza ovens are fuelled by wood, charcoal or gas. Authentic restaurantcooked pizza has a flavour and look that's impossible to replicate in a regular kitchen oven, but these compact steel ovens give the heat required to cook the best pizza, often twice the temperature of a regular oven, and take just 15-30 minutes to heat up. Flames roll across the roof on the inside of the oven to heat the stone, giving the crisp base that pizza enthusiasts love and cooking the toppings to perfection in just a few minutes.

Quick and easy to use, a pizza oven is a great way to make the most of your garden on a summer evening. Once it has cooled down it can simply be stored away in the shed or covered until the next time.

But home-cooked pizza doesn't come cheap, with prices starting just under £80 and rising to £800 and beyond. To help you find an oven that suits your garden, and your pocket, we joined forces with our colleagues at BBC Good Food to test a range of portable pizza ovens, fuelled by gas, wood or a barbecue, to see what you get for less than £400.

How we tested

We built and used each oven exactly as you would in your garden, testing with different pizza recipes where oven capacity allowed. The ovens were assessed according to the following criteria, with equal marks attributed to each: I Assembly and storage We examined the ease of assembly, the clarity of instructions and how long it took to build the oven. We also noted any storage features, and how easy it was to pack up and put away.