How to clean a pizza oven?

The dirtiest part of the pizza oven will probably be the pizza stone, especially when you first start using the pizza oven and you do not have much experience with putting the pizza in the oven 😉

Do you need to clean Ooni pizza oven pizza stone? 

The simple answer is yes you have to clean the pizza stone, but only when it is dirty. This means when you spill cheese or tomato sauce or something else. If you never spill anything from your pizza the pizza stone will be clean most of the time.

What to do when you do spill ingredients on the pizza stone and it has burned?

It is fairly easy to do and you only need one extra tool to make it even easier. Just use a pizza oven brush, this can be an Ooni pizza oven brush on something similar. 

Now that you have a brush it is time to clean the pizza stone:

Step one: Fire up the pizza oven to the highest temperature you can get it to.

Step two: Leave it empty and on the same high temperature for about 20-30 minutes or at least until the ingredients have been burned completely (meaning totally black and looking like charcoal)

Step Three: take the scraping part of the pizza oven brush and scrape the burned ingredients loose.

Step four: use the brush side to brush everything out of the pizza oven.

Step five: use a damp cloth to wipe off the dust that the brush can not remove, you can put the damp cloth around a turning peel.

An other way to do it which uses even less time is to flip the stone when the pizza stone is cold and then just use it as normal this way the stone will heat up and burn the spilled ingredients, you can then remove them. I personally prefer the first one it takes a bit of time but it is well worth it.

It is normal that there are stains on the pizza stone, some say it will give the pizza character and additional flavour.

What about the other parts of the pizza oven?

If you want or need you can clean the other parts with a towel and some water. Nothing more is needed. One thing to keep in mind is to wait until the pizza oven is cool and not hot anymore when you are going to clean the pizza oven.

How does this work for other pizza ovens?

Can I use this method to clean my pizza oven if it is not from Ooni, yes you can. The only difference can be that the second method of flipping the stone is not possible with some pizza oven because the pizza stone is fixed in the pizza oven and can not be taken out. So just use method one.