Review: Urban Pie Pinzza Roman Style Pizza (Frozen)

 Let's begin with a mildly controversial statement: You can get good - maybe great - pizza at Costco and in your grocer's freezer.

If you're not yet tuned in to the regfrigerated take-and-bake "Pinsa" style pizza at Costco, get some soon. It's better than 90% of pizzerias. Our full review is HERE. Don't confuse this "take and bake" Pinsa pie with the tasty but ordinary floppy greasy pizza that Costco sells hot up front with the hot dogs and a few other snacks.

But let's get on to the main topic here - frozen pizza. For decades, it ranged from bad to mediocre. It was elevated with the advent of the DiGiorno rising crust pies, which are better than a lot of generic mom and pop shops and better than most of the big chains like Domino's and Papa John's. 

Inside the box

More recently, true gourmet pizzas have made it into the freezer section, led by top-shelf brick-and-mortar pizzerias making a frozen version of their pies. The one that first got my attention was the Neapolitan pizza from Roberta's (review HERE), which was in the freezer section at Whole Foods. I've been to Roberta's in Brooklyn (review HERE), and I found the frozen version to be, at a minimum, a solid reminder of how good that pie is fresh out of the oven.

Fresh out of the oven

A few weeks ago, we reviewed the Table 87 Coal Oven Slice (also found at Whole Foods). It's pricey, but we concluded that "Despite some room for improvement, this is as good as frozen pizza gets; it's at least as good as the frozen Roberta's pizza."

On the same trip when I bought the Table 87 slice, I also bought the Urban Pie "Pinzza" Roman Style Pizza. Because the Costco Pinsa style pizza is so good, I was eager to try this frozen pie with a similar crust. Costco calls their crust a "Roman Pinsa" style. What's that? It is made with a combination of Italian 00 wheat flour, rice flour, and soy flour to develop a light and airy crust that’s crispy on the outside and tender on the inside. 

This particular pizza ("Pepperoni Burrata") spent a few months in my freezer, and somewhere in its journey it seems to have partially thawed, because the generous pepperoni topping was skewed to one side. It's a pretty small pie, an oval roughly 11" long and 7" wide, weighing in at 15 ounces. Like the Costco pizza, the crust has wheat, rice, and soy flours. 

Nice crisp undercarriage

Although the label says Burrata, the ingredients show whole milk mozzarella and stracciatella cheeses as well as a tiny amount of Parmesan. Perhaps it's just cheese semantics; stracciatella is a fresh Italian cheese with a creamy texture and rich flavor, made by soaking shredded mozzarella in fresh cream, and often used as the filling for burrata.

Nice structure, light and airy crust

Out of the package, the pizza was not particularly pretty, and it looked ordinary out of the oven, too (baked at 450 on the center rack for 15-17 minutes). It was done after 16 minutes and the pepperoni was getting dark on the edges. I cut it into six small slices.

The key to a successful pizza - any style, fresh or frozen - is the crust. Always the crust. And the pinsa crust on this pizza is very very good - almost great. Crispy, chewy, yet light and airy, and very tasty. It shares many characteristics with the terrific Costco take-and-bake pinsa style pizza.

The sauce and cheese were good quality, but unremarkable. They served as role players here, melding nicely while letting the crust do the heavy lifting. The pepperoni added an important umami boost; would have liked the slices to be a little thicker. Spicy cup would really lift up the overall profile!

Overall, one of the best frozen pizzas you can get. It's very good, and can get to great with some tweaks to the sauce and cheeses. $14 is cheap for a pizzeria pizza, but expensive for a smallish frozen pizza; still, I'd buy again. It's a damn good pizza to have on hand in your freezer, right next to your Table 87 pizza.