By Bryan Wall
Product Test Journalist | Kaipūrongo Whakamātautau Hautaonga
Can this bargain product really give you restaurant-quality pizza in minutes?
Pizza ovens can be an expensive investment, but hardware store Bunnings is currently selling an electric model for a bargain $99. And this model also has air-fry and oven modes too! We trialled it at home on family pizza night.
At a glance
Despite a few annoyances, we were seriously impressed with the Mistral electric pizza oven – it’s an excellent budget entry into the world of quality pizza-making at home.
Pros
Makes great pizzas!
Price
Build quality
Cooks pizza in 2 minutes up to 400°C
Viewing windows on top and front so you can watch the pizza cook
Includes pizza stone
Cons
Takes 6 minutes to reheat between pizzas
Noisy
Bulky and heavy
Air frying is a bit slow
Fiddly detachable handle for pizza shovel and air frying tray
Looking for a freestanding oven?
If you’re looking for a freestanding oven instead, check out our test results over here.
First impressions
The Mistral electric pizza oven is quite large and weighty, so you’ll need decent bench space for it, or a big cupboard for storing. Build quality is good and belies the budget price tag. It’s a good-looking product, with two large viewing windows and a brushed stainless-effect door handle. A simple touch panel on the top controls the Mistral. The whole oven glows nicely through the viewing windows when the heating elements are on.
A pizza stone is included that fits tightly into the oven. It also comes with a pizza shovel and an air-frying tray. The shovel and tray share a detachable sprung handle that you squeeze to attach to either. It’s a bit fiddly, but you do get used to it. They even throw in a pizza-cutting wheel, but it’s a flimsy one, sadly.
What it can do
There are three functions, with four presets for each, which have different times and temperatures assigned:
Pizza: DIY, frozen, Neapolitan, thin crispy
Air fry: Poultry, steak, fries, veggies
Oven: Baking, grill, defrost, dehydrate
You can also manually adjust the times and temperatures once you’ve chosen a setting, and if you’re cooking pizza, you can adjust the upper and lower (pizza stone) temperatures separately to perfect the base and toppings.
How to use it for pizza
To make the perfect pizza, you need a seriously hot oven: ideally around 300–400°C. The Mistral can get to 400°C, but it takes some time to get there.
The cooking process is as follows.
Slide the pizza stone into the oven.
Turn on the unit and select a pizza option on the touch panel.
Prep your pizza or pizzas as the oven preheats – it takes around 17 minutes to get to 380°C on Neapolitan setting.
Clip the handle onto the shovel and flour the shovel to prevent sticking.
When the oven beeps to signal that it’s up to temperature, slide your pizza in.
Shut the door – the timer will start.
Remove the cooked pizza when the oven beeps again.
I was sceptical that a pizza would cook in 2 minutes, but the Mistral proved me wrong. It’s fab to watch the pizza cook through the top viewing window, browning to perfection rapidly.
We use premade Turkish thin and crispy bases for pizzas in the Wall household. In our normal oven, they come out a bit limp and underwhelming. Out of the Mistral, they were crisp and delicious. Even the harshest critics (the kids) were happy.
Cooking multiple pizzas needs a bit of patience, as the oven has to reheat each time, which takes about 6 minutes. You could just ignore that and bung the next pizza in straight away, timing it yourself, but you won’t get quite as good a result at the lower temperature.
Our verdict on the air fryer
The additional function, air frying, is a bonus, but the Mistral is way better as a pizza oven. This is mainly due to the time it takes to air fry. Thin-cut homemade chips took nearly 30 minutes; we can usually get these done in less than 20 minutes in our normal air fryer. The Mistral is also pretty darn noisy in air fryer mode (although pizza mode is loud too)! Don’t buy the Mistral for this capability alone.
We didn’t trial the oven functions, but we reckon these could be useful for small households that don’t have an oven.
Should you buy the Mistral electric pizza oven?
For $99, you really can’t go wrong with the Mistral. Once heated up, it cooks rapidly, producing pizza you’d never achieve in a traditional oven. Just don’t buy it for its air-frying function!
