During this decades-long Pizza Renaissance, frozen pizza has taken a back seat because it's so easy to find good-to-great pizza almost anywhere. That's not to say that frozen pizza hasn't improved substantially, and so when I found the Screamin' Sicilian "Holy Pepperoni" pizza on sale for $3.99 (usually in the $6 to $9 range), it was an easy decision to stash one in my home freezer.
It spent about a month in my freezer, stored vertically in a frozen pizza storage slot. That was probably a mistake, because the pepperoni had all shifted to one side of the pie. However, it was easy to redistribute the sliced rounds and I couldn't do it without overlapping pepperoni, which means there was a LOT of pepperoni there. The pizza was pretty small, perhaps 10.5 inches in diameter.
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| Pre-bake |
The recommended baking time was 17-19 minutes at 425 degrees; mine looked perfectly done at 18 minutes. I allowed it a minute to cool before cutting it into six modest triangles.
The pepperoni dominated the sensory experience; salty, oily, chewy, umami-rich. The cheese was also prominent - chewy, creamy, and pretty much melded into the sauce. That sauce was a role player here, but the flavors of the sauce, cheese and pepperoni were nicely balanced.
The crust was disappointing, tasting like the crust of another era when frozen pizza was mediocre at best. It was soft but sturdy enough, but lacked the character of good pizza crust or even good bread. "Toasted white bread" would be the nicest thing I can say about it; it was merely a delivery vehicle for the other ingredients.
The New York Times product evaluation team at Wirecutter included this pizza in their "Top Nine" frozen pizzas, largely based on the copious amounts of cheese and pepperoni. Their reviewers were a little kinder regarding the crust, but said "The crust is no star, reminiscent of a thicker version of the crunchy, crumbly, almost cracker-like crust you’d find in a Red Baron or Tombstone pizza."
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| Underside had a little character |
For any pizza, be it frozen or delivery or in a booth at your local mom'n'pop pizza shop, the baseline for comparison is DiGiorno rising crust pizza. Is it better than DiGiorno? This one isn't, because the crust is always (ALWAYS) the most important component of any pizza.
This pizza was good, surely worth the $4 I spent and not bad even in its regular price range. But if you want a great pie that is universally available like frozen pizza, get a pizza from the food court at Whole Foods (review HERE) or get the "Pinsa" pizza in the refrigerated section of Costco (review HERE).
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