Zio Ciro, the pizza oven manufacturer from Sardinia, uses concrete for its pizza ovens, for the dome and baking surface. This makes it unique - at least for home users. You can find out how it is to bake pizza in a concrete oven and what the advantages and disadvantages are in the pizzasschaufel.ch test.
Unboxing
Once again we have come across a used pizza oven. Accordingly, our unboxing is completely unspectacular.
What immediately stands out is the extreme weight. Even though Zio Ciro tries to sell the oven as being light, 35 kilograms is unusually heavy for an oven of this size. Also interesting - the promised heating time.
Firing
After what was almost a lumbago, the time has come - the Nano is outside. That's where it really comes into its own for the first time.
The pizza oven is operated with a regular gas bottle, and since the previous owner bought the oven directly in Switzerland, it also came with the correct gas pressure regulator and connection. Since this is sadly not a given, we would like to take this opportunity to praise our competitor Marti Küchentechnik!
We'll see whether the Zio Ciro Nano really manages the 15 minute heat-up time after we've lit it. The gas burner is ignited with a lighter, just like our pizza party ovens. Not fancy, but reliable and durable.
Clever readers will have already noticed from the picture above that we have also mounted a rotating plate (half moon) at the front. In our opinion, it is not absolutely necessary, but definitely nice to have.
After 15 minutes it is time to take a first measurement.
After this disappointment, we gave the oven another 10 minutes to gather itself and reach temperature.
The 15 minute heating time is simply a lie, which is dishonest but not really surprising. We are not aware of any pizza oven in which the stone reaches 500° after 15 minutes (measured in the middle, of course).
Another ten minutes later it looked like this:
After 35 minutes it was time to go to the kitchen.
Baking
The setup for a Margherita Monday is ready.
You can also find our dough recipe or that of the Association of Neapolitan Pizza Bakers in our blog .
For tomato sauce we use our crushed organic San Marzano tomatoes with 1% salt (i.e. 4 grams per can).
We cut the Fior di latte with our Fior di Latte cutter .
After about 60 seconds (yes, the oven really did get going) the following result awaited us.
To check that the first pizza was not a fluke, we repeated the fun again.
The second pizza burned a little on one side; turning it really has to be done very quickly in this concrete fire hell; you can also turn the flame down a little once the temperature has been reached, as the concrete retains the heat very well.
We would prefer the burner to be positioned a little higher (like the Pizzaparty models) because we think that this distributes the heat better in very small pizza ovens and gives a little more space on the baking surface. However, this will probably be less of a problem with the larger Zio Ciro models (Subito Cotto line) because there is more space.
What is of particular interest in an oven with a concrete baking surface is the base of the pizza. First of all, we were extremely skeptical about this point and feared that the base would be completely black due to the lack of porosity (which a biscotto has, for example).
We were completely impressed with the bases of our pizzas. This is exactly how a pizza base should look, who would have thought that such results could come from a concrete oven.
Another positive surprise for us was cleaning with our pizza oven brush. Since the concrete floor is not porous like a biscotto, the floor does not create any dust when cleaning.
Conclusion
The Zio Ciro Nano was convincing in the test, even if the promised heating time was not even close to being achieved. The concrete construction has one huge disadvantage: the oven is extremely heavy and de facto not mobile. Apart from that, the concrete actually only offers advantages, such as better heat storage capacity and a baking surface that can keep up with a biscotto in terms of pizza quality, but doesn't produce any dust. The low-positioned burner is a small flaw, which probably doesn't really matter after a little practice with the device. Speaking of heat storage capacity, this is how the oven temperature was over an hour and a half after the flame went out:
