Thursday, April 12, 2007

Frozen Pizza bake-off day 5

Today's pizza is "DiGiorno Rising Crust Pizza" (Pepperoni Pizza). "Made with pork, chicken, and beef".

Kraft Foods (yeppers, the mac'n'cheese people) introduced this pizza back in 1996 with a gigantic $2 *billion* dollar advertising campaign with the tagline, "It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno!". They instantly seized a majority of the premium frozen pizza market from the Schwam brands (Red Baron and Freschetta), which do not have the advertising budget of a gigantic Fortune 50 company behind them.

So, is it any good? The answer is: YES.

The strength of this pizza -- indeed, its basic reason for being -- is the crust. This is a crust with the consistency and taste of a good Italian bread. It doesn't rise as well near the center as it does near the margins -- probably too many toppings pushing down on it there -- but it is, overall, by far the best crust of the pizzas I have surveyed thus far. (But don't go away, there are some more pizzas coming up that will give it a run for the money!).

Now, this is a medium-thickness crust, so it needs a suitably large dollop of toppings to balance it out. And it has them, with one exception that I'll discuss toward the end. The sauce is abundant and suitably tangy and offsets the bready taste of the crust quite well. The cheese is a bit less so, but still sufficient in quantity to provide balance to the sauce and complement the crust.

Indeed, the only disappointment is the pepperoni. The pepperoni is not in sufficient quantity or quality to properly balance the taste of the other toppings. Thanks to the tangy sauce the pizza is still very, very good. But with just a little better pepperoni, it could have been exquisite.

So, thus far, I rank this as the second-best pizza on my list of reviewed pizzas. The current leader is still day 2's entry, which did not have as good a crust but made up for it with toppings that were excellent, especially the suitably greasy and abundant pepperoni.

Still, don't go away. Who knows, tomorrow's pizza might top both of these!

-- Badtux the Pizza Penguin

3 comments:

  1. Five days of pizza. You, my fellow feathered friend, have most definitely lost your mind. Thanks to you, I can't even look at a pizza now. I hope you are satisfied...

    ReplyDelete
  2. Dear God, aren't you tired of pizza yet?

    Mixter

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hello, Mr Penguin.
    I believe I understand why the pepperoni was found lacking.
    As a general rule, I try to avoid things made of chicken, beef, and pork.
    Not to mention that it grosses me out to think of a chicken, a cow, and a pig getting it on....

    ReplyDelete

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