Solo Stove Pi Fire Pizza Oven – Easy to Use

Wade Lancaster

My family and I love camping, but sometimes our food options when we’re at a spot for a few days are pretty limited. Not anymore with the Solo Stove Pi Fire Pizza Oven.

We’ve always been big fans of our Solo Stove, and when Sean said he had a new pizza oven from Solo Stove to check out, we were more than happy to accommodate. This is the first oven of this type that the fam and I have experimented with, so I was not really sure what to expect. Needless to say, my girls were very excited to give it a whirl.

Set up of the oven was very simple: 6 screws/washers and three legs, and it was ready to sit down right on top of my existing Solo Stove. The stone for the Bonfire is 14″, so we got a pizza that was just the right size. Since the family and I do most of our camping in the summer, we just grabbed a California Pizza Kitchen frozen pizza from the grocery store for this test.

They make different-sized pizza ovens for each size of their stoves. The Yukon has a 20″ stone, and the Ranger has a 12″ stone. I like that they kept the names the same so that you know which oven to grab for your specific stove.

After the setup was complete, we set the oven aside and got the fire going. I am always so impressed with how quickly Solo Stoves really get heated up, and within a few minutes, we were ready to rock. I placed the oven on top of my Solo Stove with ease and waited for it to get hot.

My fire was starting to lose a little bit of heat, so I grabbed my heat-protected gloves (included with all oven kits), removed the oven, threw another log on the fire, and put the oven back on with the gloves.

After a few more minutes, I used the infrared temp gauge (not included) to tell me that we had a nice hot stone. The website recommends a stone temperature of 500-650 degrees before launching your pizza.

I used the stainless steel pi-turner (included with the Pi Oven + Tools kit) and placed our pizza on the stone. Within a few minutes, the cheese was already starting to bubble.

I made a few more rotations, and the pizza was ready. We removed the pizza from the stone, placed it on the bamboo pizza peel (included with the Pi+Tools kit, and good for pizzas up to 16″), removed the oven from the stove using the heat protective gloves, and got ready to eat our hot pizza.

I was really impressed with how quickly the pizza crisped up and was ready to eat. The website says 7-8 minutes, and it was that or less.

Clean-up was a breeze. Simply remove the stone (after cooling, of course), give a quick rinse/wipe down and put it back in the oven for storage in the included carrying case.

Overall, we were all very impressed with how easy this oven was to use and put away and how evenly and effectively it cooked the pizza. My only gripe was that there was a fair amount of soot on the pizza. Solo Stove recommends using harder woods, specifically oak, to cut down the level of soot on the pizza. It did not affect the flavor, and we still enjoyed our pizza.

We look forward to putting the Bonfire Pi-Fire to the true test this summer with some home-crafted artisan pies. Solo Stove even sells Neapolitan 9oz dough balls on their website, which we will have to give a shot.

If you love camping and you love pizza, this Stove and Oven are a must for your camping toolbox.