Today's pizza: Freschetta Flatbread Pizza

The whole title is, "Freschetta Flatbread Ultra Thin Crispy Crust Made With All Natural Cheese". So I preheated the oven, plunked it on the center rack as directed, let it cook for ten minutes as directed, and voila - one pizza.

As I've mentioned before, a thin and crispy crust pizza is darned hard to get right, because there simply is not enough crust to contribute a huge amount of flavor to the pizza. The usual result is that the taste of the crust gets overwhelmed by the toppings.

In this respect, Schwan's comes close, but manages to avoid perfection by one missing flavor. The crust is quite good for a thin and crispy crust pizza. It actually *is* crispy -- too many "thin crust" pizzas have a limp crust, but Schwan got this one to have a good consistency.

The "all natural cheese" was good too. It has a nice rich cheesy flavor that goes well with the toasted flavor of the crust. Think grilled cheese. Not bad at all.

And the pepperoni... well, it was a bit salty, but that's a matter of taste. Other than that, the pepperoni was exactly right for this pizza, with just the right amount of pepperoni tang to offset the cheese and toasty crust.

So what's missing, you ask? Well... the sauce. That just goes to show how devilishly hard it is to make a good thin-crust pizza. Schwan's sauce is generally tangy and tasty and offsets the mild rich flavor of the cheese nicely. But on this pizza, the sauce is basically missing in action. My suspicion is that Schwan's simply couldn't figure out how to keep the crust crispy at the same time they put a well-balanced amount of sauce onto the pizza, and so to keep the crust from getting soggy, they put too little sauce.

Close, but no cigar. I certainly wouldn't turn down this pizza if someone offered it to me, but the Freschetta Brick Oven Pizza is still the champ -- its more substantial crust allows for more substantial flavors. Nice try though. Maybe somebody, someday, will make a frozen thin crust pizza that's actually as good as pizzeria thin-crust. But that day isn't now, and my suggestion if you want a really good thin-crust pizza is to find a pizzeria specializing in that... the frozen is getting closer, but still not there.

-- Badtux the Pizza Penguin