I always knew it was too good to be true, but when a device purports to check as many boxes as the Gourmia All-in-One Pizza Oven, I get out my pen and graph paper.

Released late last year at Target stores, the Gourmia All-in-One is many things. It is a countertop pizza maker, an air fryer, and a toaster oven—and not just one of those wink-wink, 550-degree pizza ovens that leaves you placing more faith in stones than a shopping-mall mystic.

No, this Gourmia is an actual scorcher. This indoor oven can get up to blistering 800-degree Fahrenheit temps, which isn't just New York hot but edge-of-Neapolitan hot. I confirmed this via an infrared thermometer, because at such heat my other thermometers would melt or die. It's a rare (but not unheard of!) quality at $170, even among ovens that only cook pizza.

Like professional deck ovens, the Gourmia offers individual control of the top and bottom heating elements, each tunable to the aforementioned 800 degree max. Like most pizza ovens, a 12-inch pizza stone is included, but the oven also includes a rack, a fryer basket, and seven functions from bagel to air fry to broil, declaring itself a pizzafied contender for that funny counter slot between the stove and the fridge.

This would be, I figured, the winter I finally dialed in my pizzaiolo skills—skills I was sure were long dormant in me and would soon blossom into obsession. (To find your own muse, check out our guide to the best pizza ovens.)

The Long Road to Hotness

Let’s get one thing clear to home pizza nerds: This Gourmia pizza is solid. It can easily manage a New York-style pie. It can also cook something akin to a Neapolitan. This, in its price range, is a lovely enough achievement.

I have successfully char-spotted my undercarriage and puffed my cornicione, melted and bubbled my cheese atop a swirl of San Marzano. I have launched dough with less-than-ideal technique and suffered little worse than the embarrassment of an oblong pizza. If you’re starting from decent dough, the Gourmia can be dialed to make pizza you’re happy to serve to your family.

First, though, you’ll have to wait. The Gourmia thinks it needs about 20 to 25 minutes to preheat to the 750 degrees Fahrenheit recommended for a Neapolitan pie, or 15 minutes to get up to the temp needed for New York pies or thin crusts. This, at least, is when your oven will beep and declare itself ready.

In my experience, you’ll want to wait about a third longer. Leave the oven going an extra 15 minutes or more until your pizza stone heats through. This is the sort of optimization advice you might often hear in pizza baking circles, but in this oven it’s an actual necessity. In the Gourmia, a heartily heated pizza stone is your best bet for an even and reliable cook.

Why? The Gourmia’s thermostat is chaotic: Sometimes it’s low, sometimes high. It can also get goofy from spot to spot around the oven, and there's a lot of heat loss that shows up as a toasty (though not dangerously hot) oven exterior. The heating element is willing, but the regulation is weak. And so the generous heat capacity of the pizza stone itself becomes your best chance of maintaining an even pizza cook.

Note that you might have to set the temperature on the top heating element a bit higher than the presets suggest in order to fully cook your cheese. Or not. Let’s just say you don’t always know how it’s going to go, but it’ll mostly come out all right when you’re aiming at New York–style or thin-crust pies.

Short-cook, high-temp pizza is more of a dice roll. And if you're making multiple pizzas, you'll probably need 5 to 7 minutes between them to get back to temp after opening the oven.

To Fry or Not to Fry

Unfortunately, the stone offers no thermal mass as ground cover for the thermostat while on the baking or air frying settings. If you want to use this as your standard accessory oven, you will run the risk of cooking temps being zany by 30 to 50 degrees in one direction or another. At lower temperatures especially, the oven tends to run cold.

The oven gets more accurate at about 425 degrees Fahrenheit, which is lucky: A lot of recipes and frozen foods tend to fall into this range. But unless you feel like using temperature probes for all food, the oven will be tough to trust when you’re doing something that requires more precision than toasting bread or reheating leftovers.

I tried wings multiple ways, one of my standard tests for air fryers. Temperatures varied widely across the surface of the fryer basket, with cool temps at the sides and near the door. The fan from the back of the device didn’t manage much more than a strong breeze, meaning this oven’s “air fryer” function is closer to old-school convection oven. True crispness was unattainable. If you throw away an air fryer or toaster oven to make room for the Gourmia, you’ll probably soon miss it.

A Gateway Oven

Whatever the oven’s inherent limitations, the internet is littered with blissfully happy customers of this Gourmia All-In-One, or the even cheaper Walmart version without the extra cooking functions.

The reason is simple: It fills, for some, a desperate need. At a price far below the top-line models, this pizza oven can attain 800-degree temperatures, can cook indoors or in a garage during cold winters when you’re probably not out building wood fires, and will probably smoke a little but not a lot. Keep your windows open, or turn on your vent fans.

You can nail the heck out of a Neapolitan-ish pizza, experiment with dough hydration, and meditate on New York's great contribution to world cuisine. You can, for relatively low admission, decide whether to turn pizza making into a hobby.

If you do, then you will probably kick this ladder away eventually. The Gourmia is a gateway oven, one that will inevitably send you either back to your local pizzeria or to a much more expensive and reliable Ooni electric that you may, like WIRED gear team editor Adrienne So, begin to treat like a member of your family. With this low-cost oven, you get what you pay for. On the bright side, you do get something.