Witt Etna Rotante Pizza Oven Review
An oven for pizza aficionados rather than beginners.
Verdict
Make no mistake, the Witt Etna Rotante is more of an oven for pizza aficionados rather than beginners. As well as the solid build and higher price, there’s an assumption of pizza-making experience. Its features – double burners, large capacity, rotation, high temperatures – are there to help you make better pizza than the stuff you’ve created before.
Pros
- Choice of colours
- Large cooking area
- Two gas burners
Cons
- Heavy
- Expensive
- Lack of accessories
Key Features
- Oven typeThis is a gas-powered pizza oven with a rotating pizza stone.
- Maximum pizza sizeThis large oven can make pizzas up to 16-inches across.
Introduction
Less dependent on the weather than a barbecue, and faster, but still packed with alfresco charm, pizza ovens have been gaining in popularity. However, there’s a knack for getting those perfect leopard-spotted crusts, which is where Witt’s Etna Rotante comes in.
This pizza oven has been designed with a rotating pizza stone, ensuring that not only will baking be more even, but there’s also less chance of burning. And, as well as a wraparound burner at the back, there’s an additional burner under the stone, putting an end to soggy bottoms for crisp, tasty bases every time.
Design and features
- Robust, solid build quality
- Wide opening for large pizzas
- Folding legs
Those with a tiny garden could struggle to find a suitable spot for the Etna Rotante. While it’s incredibly stylish to look at, and comes in four covetable painted colours (orange, grey, black and cream), it’s a big, heavy piece of kit, weighing 26.8kg and more than 66cm wide.
It stands on four fold-out legs – although I found that these are prone to collapsing in when moved, so it’s best to find a spot for it and let it live there. Annoyingly, there’s no cover for it for storage but the exterior appears to be fairly robust and weather-resistant.
However, the pay-off for this large size is that the oven has a wide opening for getting pizza in and out. Inside, there’s plenty of cooking space – enough for a 40.5cm pizza (almost 16 inches), making it ideal for catering for a crowd. There are actually two pieces of stone: a round one that sits on a turntable and a static one in front for catching any mess or for warming small dishes.
The controls are tucked at one side, with a knob for the main wraparound burner, and one for the ‘booster burner’ that sits below the rotating pizza stone.
Between them is a button for turning the rotation on and off. Ignition of the burners is automatic and powered by a single AA battery underneath. You’ll also need four AA batteries in a separate compartment for powering the rotation, or there’s an adaptor – but this means you’ll need a power supply nearby, which restricts where you can use the oven.
The only removable parts that need cleaning are the stones. The advice is to clean these using plain water as detergents can be absorbed. I found this to be useless at getting off burnt ingredients: incinerating any debris while the oven was still in use proved to be more effective, although the stones remained blackened.
Performance
- Heats up in under 15 minutes
- Cooks pizza rapidly
- Lacks accessories, such as a peel or thermometer
One important aspect to note is that the gas hose supplied with the Etna Rotante comes with a butane connector, rather than one for propane (a more popular fuel in the UK, as propane can handle lower temperatures when outside).
This means if you can’t source butane or it’s pricey (our 13kg bottle cost £70 and was the only size available), you’ll need to source a compatible connector for your gas bottle.
Lighting the Witt Etna Rotante Pizza Oven is a particularly impressive experience. It can take a little while for enough gas to accumulate so that when you release the main burner knob, the flame doesn’t go out.
Once it’s lit, however, it gives off a huge amount of heat. Lighting the booster burner underneath is a bit trickier. There’s a small inspection hole to check that it’s lit, but as my oven was floor-standing, trying to peer through to check it was awkward. On breezier days, I found myself worrying that it would blow out and I wouldn’t notice.
The fast heat-up (Witt estimates that it’ll reach 500°C in less than 15 minutes) leaves you just enough time to stretch out the premade dough and add a topping. It wasn’t clear if the stone should be rotating while the oven was heating up, but I felt this would heat it more evenly.
There’s no temperature gauge so it was impossible to know when it had reached the right heat for cooking. One other surprise is that the oven doesn’t come with any accessories, such as a pizza peel. There’s the assumption that if you’re into pizza, you probably already have one, and Witt’s branded peels start at an additional £45.
I tried sliding pizza in and retrieving it without one but this was messy and fraught with problems. After purchasing a peel, I had far more success sliding the pizza in so that it was fairly central on the rotating stone.
I found it easier to switch the rotation off when adding and removing pizza, but with practice, you may not need to do this. The pizza does cook very quickly – Witt suggests less than 90 seconds but for toppings such as vegetables (mushrooms and peppers), I tended to leave it for two minutes so the chunks would brown a little.
I had the most success with just cheese and tomato – the more toppings, the more difficult I found it to land the pizza centrally on the stone. While I would have appreciated far more guidance from the instructions, after some practice, the pizzas I cooked consistently emerged with a noticeably fluffy risen crust, authentic ‘leopard spots’ and beautifully browned cheese.
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Should you buy it?
You’re upgrading from a pizza oven, or conventional oven, that’s limited on space or performance: Witt’s Etna Rotante offers a large capacity and excellent cooking for those passionate about pizza.
You’re new to pizza making from scratch: There’s a good choice of more affordable models to hone your craft before progressing to a large, pricey oven.
Final Thoughts
The Etna Rotante Pizza Oven is a real crowd-pleaser – capable of turning out tons of perfectly baked large pizzas and looking pretty stylish while it does it.
However, there’s a certain amount of assumed knowledge – more guidance to achieving good results, a temperature gauge, a cover, and a pizza peel included in the box would be improvements.
That said, I loved that it heated up and cooked quickly – so no waiting around for dinner – and produced consistent pizza once I’d got the hang of using it. That said, if your budget doesn’t stretch to this model, there are more affordable rotating pizza ovens available, such as the smaller Haloo Revolve, or electric pizza ovens if you’d like to avoid the faff of gas bottles altogether, such as the Ooni Volt 12.
How we test
We test every oven we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Used as our main oven for the review period
We use an IR temperature sensor to check the internal temperature.
We measure power usage to see how much the oven costs to run.
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FAQs
It burns gas for heat, but needs batteries for the rotating base and the auto ignition system; there is also a power adaptor for the rotation.
This oven will make pizzas up to 16-inches.
Full specs
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Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
