When a $10,000 Pizza Oven Is Worth the Dough

If you’ve got the bread, hot pies at home could be a piece of cake. General Electric recently announced their nearly $10,000 Monogram Pizza Oven, an indoor electric wall-ovencapable of reaching upwards of 800 degrees Fahrenheit in about 30 minutes. The oven goes on sale in September.

But is it worth $9,900? To find out, Spread Sheet compared the average U.S. pizza consumption to some notable slices. According to a 2015 report from market research firm Packaged Facts, the average U.S. household eats roughly 49 slices of pizza a year.

At Di Fara, a Brooklyn, N.Y., institution where a slice costs $5, you could buy 1,980 slices for the price of the oven, not including tax. That means about 40 years’ worth of pizza (not including hours spent waiting in line at the popular restaurant).

At Sotto in Los Angeles, the Guanciale pie, with pork cheek, ricotta, scallions and fennel pollen costs $17 a pie, or about $2.10 per slice. That is 4,714 slices, or 96 years of the good stuff.

Or there is Gordon Ramsay’s Maze Restaurant in London. Once called the world’s most expensive pizza by Guinness World Records, the roughly $145 pie included white truffle paste, fontina cheese, mizuna greens and shavings of a rare white truffle. The pie isn’t currently on the menu, but for sake of argument, it would cost $18 a slice and afford the average pizza lover about 11 years of chow.

Taylor Dawson of FirstBuild, the subsidiary of GE that is building the electric oven, said this is the most compact oven to compete with bulkier wood-burning or commercial-grade ovens. Unlike most models for sale, the oven has a built-in ventilation system, which means less expensive installation and maintenance. Mr. Dawson admitted the oven uses a lot of electricity, but compares it to the power used by a conventional oven on “self-clean” mode.

There is also the matter of taste. Di Fara’s owner Domenico DeMarco was asked whether home cooks could replicate his pies with newfangled ovens. He paused.

“I don’t think so,” he said.

Source:WSJ