How to Clean your Ooni after Winter

Spring is finally here and it's time to get outside and make some pizzas.

I stupidly left my Ooni outside without its cover all winter this year! It's damp, it's dirty and there is still caked on pizza mess all over the stone.

If you've let your Ooni care go a bit lax this year, and you need to clean your oven before you start cooking pizza, then read on.

You don't need to use any soap, water or other chemicals to clean your pizza oven. We can burn off all the soot, old cheese and other muck from your Ooni pizza stone using fire.

However, it's really important that you don't get the oven too hot too fast when cleaning your Ooni using fire. Heating the Ooni stone too quickly can cause thermal shock and the dreaded stone crack, so we want to avoid that!

Watch our video guide below to see how to clean your Ooni using just fire.

In order to cook pizza in your Ooni, you only really need to clean the pizza stone and it doesn't need to win any beauty contests. 

We want to remove any caked on pizza ingredients, soot and dirt using fire, but we don't need it to look as good as new to cook pizza.

We're going to start with just a small charcoal fire in the Ooni and allow the heat to build gradually, so fill the fuel tray with lumpwood charcoal, add one natural firelighter and get it lit.

Take the chimney cap off and make sure the flue vent is fully open. Don't worry if you can see thick smoke, that's normal when your Ooni stone is damp.

Check on the fuel every 5 minutes or so, you should have a small fire in the middle of the fuel tray. You shouldn't need to top up the fuel, we want it to burn slowly.

Leave the fire to burn for around 30 minutes. You might hear some sizzling which is the damp in the stone turning to steam.

Now we're going to add some serious heat to get the Ooni pizza stone properly clean, so we need to add a piece of wood to the fuel tray on top of the charcoal.

I used one our beech Ooni Karu 16 Logs, which is very dry, and fits the Ooni fuel tray perfectly.

Check the stone temperature after 10 minutes - if it's at 300 - 400°c that's good news and means your stone wasn't too damp! Keep the fire topped up with wood until the stone hits around 450°c.

When I checked my stone temperature after 10 minutes, it was only 150°c, which means my stone was really damp. If yours is the same, keep adding wood and keep that fire roaring for as long as it takes (in my case this was two days on and off). You can also use your pizza peel to put some of the hot embers directly onto the stone.

Once your stone is hitting 450°c use a damp tea towel wrapped around your pizza peel to give the stone a wipe and you're ready to cook pizza in your Ooni!