I have, over the years, developed a fairly robust immune system to backyard cooking gadgets. The rotisserie that promised to change my life and instead changed my garage into a place where a rotisserie lives, gathering dust and quiet resentment. The smoker I used four times before realising it required more daily attention than any of my three children. The pizza stone I bought for the regular oven, which succeeded only in convincing me that “pizza night at home” was a euphemism for “thirty minutes of waiting followed by something the shape and texture of a doormat”.

So when the good people at FAVO sent one of their pizza ovens our way with the quiet confidence of people who know exactly what they’ve built, I approached it the way I approach most things promising to revolutionise my kitchen: with my arms folded and my expectations somewhere around ankle height.

I am now, several weeks and what I can only estimate to be an alarming number of pizzas later, prepared to unfold my arms. Possibly even raise them, in something approaching triumph.

The unboxing, or: the bit that usually ruins everything

Here is where these things typically go wrong. You open the box to find forty components, an instruction leaflet translated from Mandarin via Norwegian, and a fold-out leg mechanism that requires the spatial reasoning of a structural engineer. Forty-five minutes later you’re sitting on the patio surrounded by hex bolts, questioning several of your life choices, and the pizza oven is still, technically, a box.

The FAVO dispenses with all of this in a manner I found almost suspicious. There are no legs to attach, because there are no legs, because the thing simply doesn’t need them. You pop in the batteries, connect the gas bottle, do the sensible thing and check for leaks, and that is, extraordinarily, the entire process. I timed myself out of pure disbelief. It took less time than it takes me to find the right size Allen key for anything else I own.

The bit where it actually cooks

This is where I expected the marketing to quietly deflate under the weight of reality, as marketing so reliably does. It did not.

One press of the ignition and the FAVO is off, climbing toward 450 degrees Celsius with the sort of enthusiasm I associate with teenagers and free food. Once it’s up there, you dial it back to a more sensible 350 degrees, slide your pizza in, and then – and this is the part that had me genuinely laughing out loud on my patio, alone, like a man who has finally lost it – the thing is cooked in a little over ninety seconds. Ninety seconds. I have spent longer than that deciding which cheese to use.

The rotating stone is doing the actual heavy lifting here, turning the base continuously so that every part of your pizza gets exactly the same violent, glorious blast of heat, rather than the usual domestic-oven lottery of a scorched left flank and a pale, sulking right one. The result, every single time, was a base with genuine leopard-spotting, a crust with proper chew and char, and toppings that had cooked through without turning into a crime scene. This is Napoli-style cooking happening in your backyard in less time than it takes to load the dishwasher, and I remain slightly annoyed at how casually it achieves this.

The economics, which matter rather a lot these days

Let’s talk money, because at Starts at 60 we are not in the business of recommending expensive toys purely so you can post about them. A homemade pizza, dough and all, can genuinely be pulled together for well under $10 – a bag of flour, a tin of good tomatoes, a ball of mozzarella and whatever you fancy on top, split across a batch that’ll make several bases. Compare that to the $28 you’ll now hand over for a middling pizza delivered lukewarm by a stranger on an e-bike, and the FAVO doesn’t just pay for itself, it starts looking less like a luxury purchase and more like a mildly aggressive act of household economy.

The FAVO is currently available at a special price of $969, which is worth placing in context, because the Australian backyard pizza oven market has become a genuinely crowded, competitive little battlefield over the past couple of years. At the budget end you’ll find the Ninja Woodfire Outdoor Oven for around $600 and Gozney’s compact Arc Lite for around $649 – perfectly serviceable, but smaller and considerably less capable when it comes to serious, consistent high-heat cooking. Step up into the mid-range and you’re looking at the Ooni Karu 16 or Gozney’s Arc XL, both hovering somewhere around the $800 to $900 mark depending on the bundle. At the very top of the market, Ooni’s flagship Koda 2 Max will set you back roughly $1,499, and Gozney’s premium Dome models climb higher still, before you’ve even thought about the stand, the cover, or the peel.

Sitting at $969, the FAVO lands squarely in the mid-to-upper range of that pack – priced above the entry-level ovens that can’t really compete with it on capability, and comfortably below the flagship models that charge a premium largely for brand and bulk. Given that it matches or beats the headline performance figures of ovens costing considerably more – that ninety-second cook time is faster than most of what I’ve just listed – it strikes me as one of the better value propositions currently sitting on the Australian market, rather than simply the cheapest option in the room.

And once you’ve got the basics down – which takes considerably less practice than you’d fear, given how forgiving the machine is of a slightly wonky dough stretch – the real fun begins. This is where the FAVO stops being a gadget and starts being a genuine creative outlet. Fig, prosciutto and gorgonzola. A white base with anchovy and chilli oil. Leftover roast lamb and mint yoghurt, if you’re feeling unorthodox on a Sunday evening. Because the cook time is so short and the whole process so unintimidating, you find yourself experimenting in a way a conventional oven never quite invites — nobody stands over a forty-minute bake dreaming up their next combination, but ninety seconds between attempts turns dinner into something closer to a laboratory, in the best possible sense.

The verdict

I don’t hand out full marks. It feels irresponsible, like a critic who’s never met a starter he or she didn’t adore. But the FAVO has, rather rudely, left me without a single credible complaint. It sets up in minutes, heats faster than seems physically reasonable, cooks a genuinely excellent pizza in less time than it takes to open a bottle of wine, and does all of this while costing a fraction of what you’d spend eating the equivalent out. It is, unusually for anything with the word “backyard” in its marketing copy, exactly what it says it is.

10 out of 10. Fire it up.