But I was already at the grocery store. So that confluence of ideas caused me to hatch this plan in order to address the question "How much better are frozen pizzas these days than I remember?" A thread here months ago turned a bit contentious as those who were fans of this convenience food accused those of us who weren't (whether from biblical knowledge or, like me, a lifetime of avoidance) of food snobbery. Or something like that.
And so I found myself in the frozen pizza aisle, amazed at the plethora of choices. Where did all these brands come from? Prices averaged $6-8, so for a couple bucks more than a large Sofia, I could spring for four Freezus Diskus (Bill Spohn, that's your fault) which should be enough to get lucky.
The first to go in the cart was a Cheese and Herb from American Flatbread. That cool white box with the earnest black lettering on it, no picture, looked wholesome and intellectual. I thought, if frozen pizza is student food then American Flatbread is for grad students. Bob's as big a yuppie as I am--I was explaining our wacky dinner plan as I unpacked the groceries, and upon seeing the AF box he said, "I'm definitely going to like that one the best."
The other three all had the normal full color pornicious close-ups and much title verbage to convince you of their goodness: Amy's Cornmeal Crust Three Cheese Made With Organic Flour and Tomatoes (mozz, goat, parmesan), Vicolo Original San Francisco All Natural Non-GMO Corn Meal No Preservatives No Trans-Fats Corn Meal Crust with Roasted Mushroom and SunDried Tomato, and Chef Antonio Organic Thin Crust Cheese.
I opened a bottle of 2005 Roshambo Zin from Sonoma's Dry Creek Valley to sip on during the phone call. Only, the phone call lasted for two hours, not one, and the news was shitty, so we drank the whole thing. On empty stomachs. Afterward, with a long night of pizza testing ahead of us, we pouted at each other for about two seconds then scampered off to the cellar for reinforcement. We selected a 2006 Artezin zin from Mendocino, a Hess Collection project.
Thus re-armed, on to Quality Evaluation Step #1 which was to remove the pizzas from the boxes and compare them to the pictures. Much hilarity ensued. WHERE, for instance, were the sun-dired tomatoes? In the photo, they were everywhere, edge to edge, shining like rubies above the golden mushrooms. In actual fact there were, like, three, three little dried brownish turds barely discernible from the 7 or 8 pieces of mushroom, which were gray. On the Chef Antonio, an entire third of the suspiciously light orange tomato sauce and grated cheese topping had flaked up as one and relocated to the other side of the pizza. Even funnier, the cheese on the American Flatbread had obviously been applied in a molten state with about the care and precision that my cats put into barfing. It bore evidence of having been squirted into the middle, and from there it just went where it went. Only the Amy's looked reasonably like one would expect, deducting out the efforts of a food stylist, having pretty much all the right elements in about the right quantity in all the right places.
And so I fired up the oven, and while it heated tossed some fresh arugula with oil, vinegar, salt and fresh garlic with which to top each slice. Trust me, in the process of drinking myself to death, to worry about fiber: must have greens!, must stay healthy! The plan was to eat and cook progressively, gnoshing and critiquing one slice of one pizza while the next one baked.
Quality Evaluation Step #2 was to eat the pizzas, so let's skip right to the bottom line: tried four, liked one, and that was the American Flatbread. The cheese had a nice cheesy pungence to it, the crust was tasty and it cooked well, and you could really taste the herbs. Chef Antonio's tomato sauce was absolutely tasteless. The Vicolo's crust didn't seem fully cooked. Bob declared both inedible. The Amy's pizza had a nicely flavored and juicy base of seasoned, chopped tomatoes, but we didn't like the crust and we found the goat cheese annoyingly grainy. Only the Flatbread would we eat again, but I who love cold pizza didn't think enough of it to save the leftovers for breakfast (all went into the Yardwaste Bin), and at $9 for about 11 ounces of food (it was supposed to be 12, and the the others were 13.5 to 14.5 ounces) it's very poor value compared to a large fresh wood-fired pizza from La Fiamma, where I estimate that my thin-crusted, minimally topped $23 Sofia weighs in at about 3 lbs.
Three pounds of American Flatbread? $58.67.
Conclusion? There are certainly more options in frozen pizza than ever, and there are probably better examples than I found, but these were pretty much the same crap I always thought they were. Now I realize that the point of frozen pizza is instant gratification and convenience and not to provide an alternative to fresh-baked which would have to be ordered and fetched or handed to some mopey teenager to deliver, but I have to say that if I felt the need to have frozen pizza on hand, I'd be more likely to freeze slices of a fresh pizza for eventual reheating in the toaster oven. I'd truly like what I ate, it could sit in my freezer for months and still be fresher, and it would be a far, far better value.
But hey, sure had fun.
