Gozney Tread Review: A Portable Pizza Oven for (Most) Outdoor Adventures

Number Three accesory would be the Tread Venture Bag ($100). It's padded top and bottom for easy transport, and there's room inside for the Roof Rack, propane hose, and a short-handled pizza peel (Gozney makes one of those, too), plus other small things you might want to carry with you.

There's also the Tread Mantel ($90), which adds surface area to the oven's mouth to supply a little additional work space. It's a nice-to-have for cooking at home or tailgating where weight and packing space aren't concerns, but it's easy to do without if, say, you're hauling all this stuff up to a mountain lookout.

How I tested the Gozney Tread + Lessons in cooking

For backcountry skiing, I prefer a setup that prioritizes the downhill. That's the fun part, and I'll deal with heavier gear going up if it means I can hammer and slash going down. A different version of the philosophy applies to pizza; if the pies aren't five-star, what does it matter where the oven can go?

So to put some variables under control, I first tested the Tread at home, on the deck. Dry runs are best practice—I wouldn't take a new pair of trail running shoes on a multi-day hut-to-hut hike before lacing up at home either.

My first pizza was a total failure. Gozney recommends curing the oven for 30 minutes on the first firing, which I did, and starting with store-bought dough, which I didn't do. Instead, we used overhydrated homemade dough and overloaded it with toppings, which I smeared across the cordierite while placing the pizza.

Lesson learned, every pie since (minus one that turned into an accidental calzone) has been a success. I'm not unpracticed—I use my mom's Ooni Karu 2 Pro on most visits, and a friend has Gozney's much more deluxe Dome S1. By my marks, the quality of the pizza you can cook in the Tread is no different from those models. But the size is; smaller pizzas are easier to manage, but the Tread's tight space—it's 12.4 inches, just big enough for a placement peel—might make that tricky for beginners. Using a turning peel can help.

Once you get the hang of turning, it's a cinch to crank out pizza after pizza on the Thread. The Tread comes to temp fast, too (upwards of 900 degrees), and it's easy to adjust.

Testing the Tread on a mountaintop

While initial testing was done at home, on a recent Saturday, I hit the trail with the Tread and its accessories, and enough dough, sauce, and cheese for four pizzas. The trail my fellow gear testers and I picked was a lesser-traveled one and, at 1.3-ish miles, relatively low-stakes for high reward: views out over Lake Champlain and its bays and islands to and beyond Vermont's Green Mountains.

In my pack, I carried a five-pound propane tank (smaller than the ones gas grills use) that I picked up at my local hardware store, along with a Nemo Moonlander camping table, a cutting board, some rags, a pocket knife, and headlamps. My partner carried all the pizza ingredients in her bag. Each of us held one handle of the bag carrying the Tread and all of its accessories. We used our spare hands to trade off carrying the quad-pod Venture Stand.

The Tread is lightweight for a pizza oven, but at 30 pounds, plus the weight of accessories, it blows away recommended base weights for backpacking. But Gozney doesn't recommend it for backpacking, it doesn't even recommend it for doing what we were doing. The marketing for the Tread is pretty fair—it shows the oven in some spectacular settings, but there's a vehicle, a cooler, some surfboards, or other things that imply it wasn't carried too far in the frame. The propane tank is there too, except for a few shots where the oven is alight without any fuel source. (Propane tanks aren't photogenic, I get it, but this is still a little misleading.)

After carrying the Tread in our hands, switching sides, and carrying it with the straps on our shoulders, we called it quits on tandem-carry and I tilted the bag on its side and wore it on my front. The Venture Bag is not made for this; it was manageable but not comfortable. Carrying the Tread this way reminded me of shouldering 80-pound canoes for long portages in the Adirondacks. Amazing experiences and grueling realities often accompany one another.

After a brief and steep final ascent, the trees opened up onto a granite ledge overlooking the lake. Here, we pitched the quad-pod close to the ledge, using its level to adjust it on the rounded mineral surface, locked the Tread on top (easily done with a simple sliding release), attached the propane, and in 15-ish minutes, we were up to temp.

The oven swivels on its stand to avoid wind but there wasn't any on this day. With the golden hour light of a summer evening setting in just as our first pizza was coming out, the scene was pretty darn perfect. Part of me wished we'd brought more friends along; sunsets and pizza are things improved by sharing (also, we could've taken turns carrying the oven on the way up).

We left the ledge around 8 PM, having let the Tread cool down long enough to put it back in its bag (about 20 minutes). For the descent, I passed off the propane tank pack and wore the Tread bag on my front. Picking my way down the rocky trail, I couldn't help but imagine designs for a custom backpack for carrying the Tread to places like this more easily, with ultralight fabrics and maybe a tumpline.

The reality of the afternoon lived up to the years-old fantasy those contrived images created. It took more sweat than my T-shirt could absorb to get the Tread and everything we needed to make pizzas to the top of a relatively small and accessible mountain. Making pizza in a place like that might be more of a once-a-summer tradition, but I wouldn't think twice about bringing it car camping, on canoe trips, or pulling it to a ski cabin on a sled.

Final Thoughts: Is the Tread worth it?

With all the features of a high-quality at-home pizza oven in a smaller size that's still big enough for 12-inch pies, the Tread makes good on its claim of being a supremely portable pizza oven.

It's also affordable as far as pizza ovens go, but accessories that seriously upgrade the experience, like the Venture Stand and Roof Rack, cost quite a bit extra. At just under 30 pounds, it's still a hefty load to haul to truly far-flung destinations, but the Tread is perfectly suited to adventures by car, boat, bike, or packhorse. The quality of the pizza you can make with the Tread—and with the right ingredients and some practice—is worth all the effort it may take to share your pizzas with a view.

$500 AT GOZNEY