90
A wood or gas fired oven mainly for hot and fast cooking…. ideal for pizza!
The first thing you'll notice about Roccbox is the quality. It comes in quality packaging, the peel is awesome and the oven is beautifully made. Everything about Roccbox has a feel of supreme quality and finish. It's a beautiful looking appliance with it's alien like appearance and tall stance with large stainless steel mouth. Roccbox was an Indigogo crowd funded campaign. Many crowd funded products never come to fruition. The ones that do are quite often of poor quality and nothing like the representations made at the time of pitching for money. This is neither. It's a carefully considered, designed and manufactured high end portable wood and gas fired oven. It’s real, it exists, it’s epic and you need one in your life.
Roccbox arrives packed up in polystyrene inside a nicely printed cardboard box and is ready to be lifted out of the box by a very sturdy yet simple, nylon and Velcro strap with carry handle. It's a heavy beast but it's still plenty mobile. Heavy is good when it comes to pizza ovens. When it arrives it's legs are tucked underneath itself, ready to be deployed. The gas and wood burner is secured by locating pegs into key hole slots in the body, giving it a twist and locking it into place. That's it, assembly done! You're literally up and running within a minute or two from opening the box. It comes ready to rock with gas pipe and regulator attached. Just don't forget to buy a bottle of gas. I like the small fibreglass BP Patio Gas bottles as they're nice and light. A 5kg bottle will give you an approx runtime of 20 hours.
With a thick stone floor, built in temp probe and insulation, Roccbox holds a real steady temperature giving extremely consistent results. Once up to temp the gas burner can be turned to minimum and it will happily tick over for hours maintaining floor temp. When you're ready to cook, turn it up to the max and slide in a pizza. The pizza is fully visible through the open front so there's very low risk of burning a pizza so long as you're paying attention.
It comes finished with a durable green or grey silicone outer casing. It's hot to the touch but your skin won't stick to it if a hand is placed on it by mistake. Roccbox is fairly weather proof but should be sheltered as constant getting rained on is likely going to let water into the oven which may cause problems.
Roccbox also arrives with a professional grade anodised aluminium perforate peel. It's a lovely thing. A peel of this quality would cost you £50-£100 alone. It's perforated to let any excess flour drop through so it doesn't burn on the stone floor. It also just looks cool.
Fully capable of being run on gas or wood, it's an incredibly versatile bit of kit. The gas is lit in seconds with the click of a button at the back. The heat output is variable so you can do lower slower cooks but it's still pretty intense heat of 300°C or so. Lock in the wood burner kit and you're free from gas bottles and hoses and ultra mobile. Cut some kiln dried hard wood up into pieces around 2-3" in length and an inch in diameter and you're cooking on wood with a 15-20 minute preheat. I found I could get it up to temp on wood quicker than gas. Gas is mega convenient though. I'm a true wood fired geek but I do run it on gas quite often. It's so easy to turn out a quick awesome 60-90 second pizza with the click of a button. I always have some dough cold proofing in the fridge ready to go so a quick click and you're cooking in 30 mins.
So what have we cooked on this thing? Naan breads, pittas and all kinds of flat breads. Shrimps, chicken, pizza, kebabs, greens, steaks.......anything that cooks pretty quickly. Blanch some broccoli and asparagus, pop in a cast iron pan, give it a drizzle of garlic oil and a sprinkle of salt and pepper and slide it into the Roccbox for a minute or so. Lush!
Take a ribeye, about an inch thick. Drop it into a preheated cast iron pan and slide into Roccbox.... no oil, no salt, no pepper..... just let the fat contained within the ribeye do its thing. Let it have 3 minutes or so and flip it over. When beautifully caramelised on the outside, pop a knob or two of herby butter (rosemary, thyme, garlic, salt, pepper, butter) on top and give it another 20 second inside Roccy. Rest, slice, devour. Best steak sandwich ever.
So...... that's Roccbox. Beautiful, quality, easy, quick.......... awesome!
Roccbox
Chris Phillips