This Top Chef-Approved Outdoor Oven Deserves a Spot on Your Patio

Oh, the Versatility!

When it says 8-in-1, it means it. It has functions for max roast, specialty roast, pizza, broil, smoker, bake, dehydrate, and warm. Max roast sears and creates charred and crispy food. It was great for cooking salmon, searing steaks, and blistering vegetables.

The specialty roast function is customizable so you can start high and finish low to give a sear and crisp up the outside, and then slowly cook the food inside. It basically takes care of you having to reduce the temperature in the oven or move food on the grill for indirect cooking. This function is great for one-pan meals with meats and veggies together. The specialty roast also works for bread: Start it at a higher temperature for the last rise in the oven, then reduce the temperature to let the bread bake.

The bake function works like a regular indoor oven, but the option to add smoke to any function is a unique feature of the Ninja Woodfire Oven. I made a batch of mac and cheese with a smoky flavor and cooked tandoori chicken. That lingering taste of fire in the chicken was similar to food cooked in a tandoor.

There is also the broil function should you want to quickly brown something or melt cheese, and the oven can go as low as 105 degrees Fahrenheit to dehydrate. While the capacity somewhat limits the quantities you can dehydrate, I liked that I could just toss leftover herbs into it to dehydrate or make a small batch of dried fruit.

At-Home Pizzeria

The high point of outdoor cooking for me is a pizza party—the collective joy of pizza making and eating creates the most fun parties. But for a successful one, you need high—very high—heat.

I was excited to find out that the Ninja Woodfire Outdoor Oven heats up to 700 degrees Fahrenheit. It does take about 25 minutes to come to temperature for a Neapolitan-style pie, but once it gets there, you can cook pizzas back-to-back, with each taking about 3 minutes to cook. This might seem a little slower than some other pizza ovens, but what I loved about the Ninja, was that I did not have to turn the pizza midway through cooking! Once you set up the time—3 minutes for Neapolitan style or 8 minutes for New York style—the oven basically takes over and does the baking.

The pizzas and flatbreads I made were always evenly cooked. The cheese on the pizza was evenly melted with nicely browned spots. Along with the preset settings for different styles of pizza including frozen pizzas, you can also make pizza with your own custom settings.

The Smoker and The Smoke Box

While I cook barbecue for a large gathering in my massive smokers, I don’t particularly want to make one or two racks of baby back ribs in them or smell like a campfire for cooking two portions of meat. Luckily for me, the Ninja can cook up to 9 pounds of brisket or smoke a turkey up to 13 pounds, infusing the food with woodfire flavor with just a 1/2 cup of pellets.

Due to the smaller surface area, I had to cut the ribs in half to place them in the oven. The upside is that now I can cook BBQ for my small family any time I want because it is super simple to do: Fill in the smoke box on the side of the oven with pellets, set the oven to smoke function, set up time and temperature, and press start. The smoke function automatically ignites the pellets, and the oven was true to temp any time I checked. Other than going in to turn the food if needed, I did not have to monitor it, allowing me to finish up the sides in my kitchen. I am not admitting anything, but smoked chicken wings might have appeared on the menu on many occasions.

The smoke box can also be ignited in any function to add a smoky flavor to any dish so you can taste brick-oven flavor without all the work brick ovens entail. I have been using the feature to add smoke to anything and everything. Sheet pan dinners, mac and cheese, dal makhani, and—because you can cold smoke food in the oven—I even smoked flour to make pasta. The smoke flavor was especially robust in the Smoked Korean Chicken Thighs with Cabbage, Pineapple, and Crispy Bacon that I made from Chef Kristen’s recipe.

The accessory frame is a little hard to push in and push out for the first few times. It seemed to work smoothly after that.

An Interview with Kristen Kish

I had a lot of fun making your recipe for Smoked Korean Chicken with Cabbage, Pineapple, and Crispy Bacon. It has layers of smoky, sweet, and spicy flavors with many textures. How did you go about developing that and other recipes for the Woodfire Outdoor Oven?

When I think of items to cook at home, I always think about what I want to cook and what am I craving in that exact moment. So that day, I was craving these five things, and the thinking process is, what can you do to use all different ranges of the Ninja Outdoor Oven? In the moment, I am really thinking about what feels efficient, and is it something that I would also do when I had less than an hour to make dinner. Any time you can make dinner on one vessel or just super efficiently and it still tastes different than anything else I would have cooked, I’m all about it.

Based on your experience while developing recipes for the Ninja Woodfire oven, what was the most exciting feature that triggered your creative curiosity? And what sets it apart from other similar products in the market?

There [are] two. [First], the high heat a la, a very awesome pizza. There are plenty of pizza ovens out on the market. A lot of them are just for pizza and then you have to find creative ways to use it outside of that. The fact that it can get up to 700 degrees gives you a new toy to play with in addition to what you already have in a standard home kitchen.

Secondly, any time I can impart wood flavor without doing a full smoke I am all about it. In my restaurant, I have this live fire grill and we’re using Texas Mesquite wood and I can naturally develop that flavor. But that’s my restaurant. For home, if you can just do it in a very simple way that is efficient and easy to use while yielding the flavor that I like, that’s something I want to have in my cooking appliance.

What are some of the things home cooks should think about when trying to recreate some of their own recipes to cook in the Woodfire Oven? Especially someone who is a beginner cook and just venturing out?

I feel like if you’re in the kitchen experimenting with something new you bought, you get started by going in there and making your mistakes and you’re allowed to do that. And then you can start to play around as you’ve already made some form of mistake and learned from those, which guides your decisions moving forward.

In the Smoked Korean Chicken with Cabbage, Pineapple, and Crispy Bacon recipe, it has bone-in, skin-on chicken, which needs caramelization, then bacon that needs crisping; it has cabbage that adds moisture. I think the beauty of something like the gochujang chicken thighs for me was you have something that’s high sugar and you have something that needs to be cooked all the way through so when you think of putting all those things together you may think that you have to add those at different steps in different areas in order to yield that product. But cooking it all on one pan and having it still come together is all about choosing things that are resilient.

What was it like partnering with Ninja and having this experience of creating new recipes for the outdoor oven?

I think any time I’m asked to try a new product or want to partner with it, it doesn’t matter what it is. I always try it before we agree on anything. And I say this every single time, I do not partner with anything that I actually don’t find a true value in.

I started messing around with the Ninja Oven, and if I’m being honest, the very first thing that always appealed to me is that it’s an outdoor oven—because coming up in kitchens and working in my restaurant leaves you smelling like food. So, if I could put the smell and the cooking outside, I am all for it all day.

The day I was testing, it was raining just a little bit and it worked just the same. Obviously, don’t go out there in a lightning storm but it’s all good in a bit of rain.  All the things that add value to my home life and cooking at home—if it kind of starts to check all those boxes—that’s 100% where I start. And with the Ninja Woodfire Oven, I was proven time and time again that whether I do puff pastry at 350 degrees as a normal bake setting or I do Neapolitan pizzas at 700 degrees, it all worked out.