I can’t eat pizza anymore, but I used to LOVE these things. I wouldn’t really call it a pizza as much as pizza-like. They’re horribly processed, from the odd crust on up, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t tasty as hell in their own right. I would always turn the broiler on for the last couple minutes to get a nice brown color to the cheese. Heavenly. Thinking about it now, I’m wondering if eating one wouldn’t be worth the pain. My UC has me hurting all the damn time anyway.
Stay away from Tony’s pizza. They’re similarly sized and priced, but they’re no Totino’s.
Didn’t Totino’s used to be Jeno’s, or vice-versa? I’ve been unable to eat pizza for so long, so I haven’t kept up, but I do remember that a Tony’s Pizza is a disappointing experience.
That’s just it: Totino’s, as pizza, is terrible. Once you get past thinking of it as pizza, though, you’re set. They’re sort of a comfort food that I will occasionally indulge in. They remind me of chilly winter days when I was a kid and no one else was around; I’d put one in the oven and sit on the kitchen floor to read while it cooked, enjoying the bit of radiant heat.
When I was a kid, my mom used to get Tony’s frozen pizza. I loved that stuff…the pepperoni used to curl up into little cups full of grease. Mmmmmmmmmmmm…
You can’t get frozen pizza with that kind of pepperoni anymore.
my favorite is Tombstone. Peperony and chease. However they are too expenisve like 4$ for one now that the prices have gone up, so I stockpile them when they’re on sale, and otherwise I get the Totino’s which are so cheap.
I add more toppings to all frozen pizzas. Actually, I would like to get some of that shredded or cubed pepperoni they put on the cheaper pizzas. I don’t like whole pepperoni slices since they tend to drag lava-hot cheese onto my face(which isn’t as fun as it sounds) when I take a bite.
Totinos are a bad bad comfort food, I keep them for when I am sick. We add extra mozz and pepperoni that we keep on hand.
We much prefer to make pizza from raw materials when we have the time. Much better control over what goes in. Our usual is a very classic margarita, olive oil, garlic, slices of tomato and good mozzarella and plenty of fresh basil. Much less garbagy - no high fructose corn syrup, more fat from olive oil than cheese, plenty of garlic and basil. Unfortunately the tomatoes were disappointing this winter =( and my aerogarden that is tall enough for tomatoes had ghost peppers planted in it for my roomie. Next winter it will have lovely vf Romas, and Phlip can grow her own peppers =)
I’m partial to Red Baron’s Pan Pizza. I also like Freschetta, but they only seem to have the brickoven style, which I don’t like as much as the regular kind.
I had a cousin (well, I still have the cousin) who would microwave Totino’s party pizzas. They’d come out soggy as all hell, and he’d just fold it in half like a taco and eat it that way.
Schwan’s makes Freschetta, Tony’s, and Red Baron brands; IIRC, the rising-crust Schwan’s pizzas my ex always had in the freezer were exactly the same as Freschetta rising-crust pizzas. I miss the Schwan’s pizza ring-- a big rising-crust dough ring, filled with mozzarella, that came with a dipping cup of tomato sauce. It was available for a while under the both the Schwan and Freschetta names, but I haven’t seen it in a while.
Overall, much of the food available through Schwan delivery is available in freezer cases under various brand names.
After trying a very large number of different pizza’s I found that my favorite was actually a store brand. Unless they changed the recipe, Safeway select supreme pizza is superb for frozen pizza. It has an interestingly spicy sauce and lots of toppings. A consistency that resembles freschetta but cheaper and more flavorful. Even leftover slices are quite good. I like large amounts of veggie’s on my pizza so I usually add mushrooms and sliced green peppers to any of my frozen pizzas.
I wonder if the problem could be avoided by freezing the sauce first, then depositing the frozen sauce disk on the frozen crust, so the sauce has no chance to soak into the crust before freezing.
You guys in the US can seriously buy a frozen pizza for one dollar? The regular price here in Canada is 7 or 8 bucks, and they go on sale for like 4 or 5 bucks sometimes.
That’s about what most ‘quality’ frozen pizzas go for here too, but we also have a wide variety of insanely cheap frozen dinners, not just pizza, that may or may not contain actual food.
I add penzey’s pizza seasoning to frozen pizzas either before or after baking, helps a lot. Once the sample jar from them was used up i made my own batch using their spices and the pizza seasoning ingredient list, but salt free since frozen pizza is salty enough.
The majority of pizza varieties in supermarkets here are refrigerated (although you can freeze some of them, if you insist). They do have frozen pizzas too, but honestly I don’t know why people choose them, unless they buy a month’s worth of food at a time. I suppose if you’re going to put them in the freezer you might opt for the ones explicitly designed for that purpose, but I doubt that the freezing process would make the refrigerated ones any worse than the frozen ones already are.
I don’t know about anyone else, but for me, it’s nice to have something in the freezer that I can pop in the oven on a moment’s notice if I get hungry, like say at 3am, after a late, long night of 3.2% Utah beer and a few slammers of Czechoslovakian Angel Dust…:dubious:
Seriously though, you really can’t see why someone may possibly want something on hand in the freezer that is quick, easy, inexpensive, relatively tasty and ready to eat in a few moment’s notice?
I don’t think many people are arguing that frozen pizza is the world finest food or anything, but it obviously has some appeal. Afterall, the frozen food industry is a $679 billion dollar per year business, just in Rosie O’Donnell’s neighborhood alone.
