Ooni changed the game for home pizzas many years ago with their wood-fired pizza oven, which gave the traditionally large backyard cookers a compact, tabletop-sized form factor. They followed it up later with gas and electric models that made pizza-making even more accessible. This time around, the outfit is looking to help you round out your pizza-making arsenal with the Ooni Halo Pro.
Billed as “a different kind of mixer for the modern home baker,” the appliance seeks to bring spiral mixing technology to home kitchens, allowing home cooks and pizza lovers of all stripes to make better pizza dough than your traditional stand mixer. Not only is it sized to fit comfortably in most kitchen counters, it also comes in a design that looks perfectly at home in a residential setting instead of commercial and industrial kitchens.
The Ooni Halo Pro is a spiral mixer, meaning both the hook and the bowl revolve around a breaker bar, effectively creating a dual-kneading action that produces those long gluten strands that help dough to proof and develop more effectively. Both the breaker bar and the bowl are removable, too, making cleaning up after mixing a much easier affair. The bowl, by the way, measures 7.3 quarts, with enough room to fit up to 11 pounds of dough, which is enough to make up to 20 12-inch pizzas or six large loaves of bread. Yep, you can run a veritable baking operation with this thing in tow.
There’s a large dial on top for controlling the machine’s operation, with 58 separate RPM controls from 60 RPM to 1,000 RPM, so you can fine tune how slow or how fast you want the kneading process to go. You can also use the dial to set a timer for those times you’re pretty certain of how long the mixing process is supposed to take. Below the dial is a digital output, so you can see exactly how much time remains and what speed the machine is currently running at, eliminating the need for any guesswork.
The Ooni Halo Pro has a robust die-cast aluminum body with a fair amount of weight, so it should stay stable on your counter while its motor goes into heavy work. While it’s big, it’s not quite on the same size as the smaller spiral mixers available today, making it a lot more suitable for home kitchens. More importantly, it doesn’t look an industrial mixer, which is the case with the current crop of options in the category, so you won’t make your kitchen look like you’re running a bakery in the living room.
Aside from mixing pizza dough, the mixer can do other things, too. Specifically, it comes with a geared whisk and a flexible beater accessory, which you can equip in place of the spiral hook for whipping up cake batters, pastries, cookies, and other baked goods. After all, it would be a waste having a powerful mixer in the kitchen and have it do nothing but pizza dough, despite some people’s insistence on pizza being their daily diet staple.
The Ooni Halo Pro comes out in April, priced at $799.
