Everything You Should Know Before Buying Frozen Pizza
Associated with cash-strapped college students and undiscerning children, frozen pizza doesn’t exactly have a reputation for quality. (And as long as you have the right recipe, homemade pizza can’t be beat.) Still, it’s not hard to see why more than 1.3 billion frozen pies were sold in the United States last year: It’s a cheap and convenient meal that comes in an endless array of options. We’ve noticed a trend of manufacturers trying to cash in on the current “artisanal” pizza craze by offering “brick oven” or “fire baked” frozen products that promise a more gourmet, pizzeria-style pie. We wondered: Does this mean there’s better frozen pizza out there?
Behind the scenes in the test kitchen: Assistant Testings and Tastings editor Lauren Savoie uses a digital caliper to measure and compare the thicknesses of different brands of cooked frozen pepperoni pizza.
For our in-depth taste test, we focused on pepperoni-topped pies and assembled a lineup of seven pizzas in the test kitchen—three artisanal-style pies, three national best-sellers, and the pepperoni version of a cheese pizza from a brand we’ve liked in the past. So, what interesting tidbits did we learn about frozen pepperoni pizza?
1. CHEESE MATTERS
Tasters liked clean, traditional, milky mozzarellas, and four of the seven products delivered. Of the three that we didn’t like, one product tasted sooty from the addition of smoked gouda. Worse, another product’s cheese was so waxen that some tasters called it “prison pizza.”
2. SAUCE MATTERS MORE
When we got to the sauce, the gap between good and bad was even wider. Our tasters preferred herby sauces with strong tomato flavor and balanced tang. Overly sweet sauces earned low marks for tasting “cheap” and processed.
3. CRUST MATTERS MOST
It’s not surprising that this was the most important element to our tasters, and newer artisanal-style crusts won by a landslide. Tasters thought that they held the weight of the toppings better and actually resembled “real” pizza.
Not all frozen-pizza crusts are made equal.
4. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE BAKE
We compared each product’s instructions and noticed that pies baked at lower temperatures for longer outperformed those that cooked shorter and hotter. Temperature matters more than time when it comes to moisture loss. Higher temperatures conduct heat into the bottom of the pizza faster, causing the crust to lose more water and turn brittle, while products that baked lower and slower emerged evenly tender.
5. QUALITY FROZEN PIZZA COMES AT A PRICE
Our recommended pizzas are nearly twice the cost of bottom-ranked products, and about on par with a delivery pie of the same size. Still, we think that a premium-quality frozen pizza is worth the extra dough, so we’ll reach for our winner.
DID YOU FAVORITE PIZZA MAKE THE CUT? Read our rankings now.
*Taste test results are free for non-members through June 2015.
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