Tag: Pizza

California Pizza Kitchen For One Sicilian Pizza

Ace 12 Comments

Pizza is a food that is typically shared, whether it be with your family while watching Brink reruns on the Disney Channel or with your friends watching Billy Madison after vaporizing a half pound of weed. It’s cheap, filling, and one of the few foods that you have to eat with your hands in order to not look like a douchebag. The folks at the Kraft Foods company, however, have turned eating pizza into a more fanciful singles affair.

They recently launched their “For One” pizzas for their DiGiorno and California Pizza Kitchen lines, individual-sized pies made for your hectic lifestyle. According to their PR release, “consumers now have a reason to look forward to eating alone.”

Seriously − what the fuck? Now, I don’t really think that the people at CPK want to turn Americans into a group of misanthropic zombies eating alone in a giant auditorium like some strange existentialist painting from soviet Russia, but you have to admit that it sounds a bit creepy.

I was thinking that if this pizza is good enough to make me not want to eat with my loved ones, it must taste like some divine combination of ambrosia and the first fifteen seconds of Fruit Stripe gum. The box certainly looks promising − with interesting ingredients such as fontina cheese and spicy ham. At a mere 5.5 ounces, however, I was worried that it would be the pizza equivalent of a cock-tease.

My fears were alleviated upon consumption. While it is on the small side, it is adequate for a substantial lunch if you have a side salad to go along with it. The crust is super thin and crispy, perfect for piling on the meat toppings that actually taste like quality Italian sausages. It shouldn’t be surprising that a meat product actually tastes like it’s supposed to, but my mind has been ruined by 19 years of emulsified chicken. The Italian herb and cheese seasoning is a tad bit strong, but separates the flavor from other boring pizzas.

The box says it’s microwaveable, but believe me: no pizza, no matter how many gray discs and grid-lined cartons they cram in the package, is anything other than crap from the microwave. Stick with a toaster oven and your patience will be rewarded.

At $3.29, it is a bit on the pricey side, but it is a nice treat for yourself after all of those years stocking up on Celeste and Jeno’s every time they go on sale for $.89. You know what I’m talking about. So if you enjoy a quality frozen pizza, go ahead and give this a try and look forward to eating alone for the rest of your life!

(Nutritional Facts – 1 pizza – 450 calories, 200 calories from fat, 22 grams of fat, 8 grams of saturated fat, 1 gram of trans fat, 35 mg of cholesterol, 820mg sodium, 42 grams of carbs, 2 grams of dietary fiber, 4 grams of sugar, 21 grams of protein, 10% Vitamin A, 0% Vitamin C, 30% Calcium, and 8% Iron)

Item: California Pizza Kitchen For One Sicilian Pizza
Price: FREE (retails for $3.29)
Purchased at: From the nice CPK PR peeps
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Good quality meats compared to what you usually get in frozen pizzas. Thin crust is very crispy. Comes out perfectly after a few minutes in the toaster oven. You get to look forward to eating alone.
Cons: Pretty small, even for an individual pizza. Herb seasoning is a bit strong. Pricey for a frozen pizza. No pizza is ever microwaveable. Reruns of movies such as Brink and Smart House on the Disney Channel.

REVIEW: Red Baron Singles: Pepperoni Deep Dish Mini Pizzas

Ace 17 Comments

With so many new products coming out every month, it’s become very hard to be competitive in the world of frozen pizzas. Creepy weirdo Wolfgang Puck and the fancy folks at California Pizza Kitchen can make shopping for a decent pizza very confusing. You’re already racking your brain wondering how Rachael Ray got her own talk show; you don’t need more queries running through your head.

So when you don’t feel like having peanut butter or bean sprouts on your pizza, you want something hearty, simple, and fattening. That’s where the Red Baron comes in. When he isn’t shooting down pilots during World War I, he’s making cheap frozen pizzas that are made with four foundational ingredients: cheese, dough, sauce, and grease. Pepperoni is often added for flavor. This is the case with these mini deep dish pizzas, which are look like the result of Bagel Bites ingesting a cocktail of steroids and HGH every morning.

Half of the battle with enjoying a frozen pizza is how you cook it. In my lazier days, I would simply microwave the crap out of it and then fry it on a bed of butter and parmesan cheese to crisp up the bottom. It was definitely quicker, but was it really worth the shame spiral that I put myself through? Probably not. The toaster oven is really the best place to heat these up, as you simply throw it in for ten minutes before being rewarded with crispy rounds of pizza goodness.

The box, though, claims that it is microwavable. We all know, however, that microwave pizzas are forever doomed to be disgusting and impossible to heat evenly. The cheese and sauce form a pink blob of sadness as they meld together in unholy matrimony. The cheese on the outside is burnt and the middle of the pizzas are filled with a small pool of water from the uncooked cheese. I’d venture a guess and say that the silver “crisping” trays that come with most microwavable pizzas are made from painted cardboard. This method of cooking is not recommended.

As for the pizzas themselves, they are sufficient for a quick snack and are perfect as an hors d’oeuvre at a hoity-toity sports party. You can even use them to feed your friends who you do not think can eat a regular pizza without smearing toppings all over your furniture. They are easy to eat and have those delectable cubes of pepperoni in order to ensure that every bite is filled with that greasy and salty flavor that America has fallen in love with.

Just don’t be expecting a Chicago deep dish where the majority of the pizza is toppings. These pizzas are mostly crust, so those of you who love your toppings and sauce might want to steer clear. Overall, it’s a cheap and filling pizza product that’s easy to make. You may not be getting any organic toppings or a message about some type of fair trade, but you’ll probably be too stuffed to care.

(Nutritional Facts – 4 pizzas – 470 calories, 26 grams of fat, 13 grams of saturated fat, 0.5 grams of trans fat, 40 mg of cholesterol, 980mg sodium, 43 grams of carbs, 2 grams of dietary fiber, 4 grams of sugar, 16 grams of protein, 8% Vitamin A, 4% Vitamin C, 20% Calcium, and 15% Iron)

Item: Red Baron Singles: Pepperoni Deep Dish Mini Pizzas
Price: $2.00
Purchased at: Albertsons
Rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: Cubed pepperoni and ergonomic design makes for easy eating. Very quick to crisp up in the toaster oven. Can be served on a fancy tray with other bite-sized appetizers.
Cons: Mostly crust. Come out terribly in the microwave. Shopping for frozen pizzas can be confusing. Frying a microwaved pizza in order to crisp it up.

REVIEW: DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust Pizza

Marvo 9 Comments

DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust Pizza

Phew. Thank goodness it’s over.

We decided to lift the self-imposed ban on food reviews here at the Impulsive Buy, because we would like to get rid of all these empty boxes and bottles of food products that we couldn’t review because of the stupid ban.

So that means food reviews up the wazoo for the next few weeks.

Also, sorry about yesterday’s “review.” We know it really wasn’t a “review.” We just wanted to be political like many other blogs, so we pretended to be interested in politics, like Ben Affleck does.

We know. We know. If all the other blogs jumped into a volcano, would we jump into the volcano too?

No we wouldn’t.

So we’re back to real reviews and the subject of today’s review was requested by Impulsive Buy groupie worshipper follower, Alisa.

She asked if we, in her own words, “review geniuses” could review the new DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust Pizza. After consulting with each other to determine if she did an adequate amount of sucking up, we decided to go though with the review and picked up the Three Meat Pizza version.

Just to let you know, microwave foods aren’t our best friends. From the exploding TV dinners to burnt microwave popcorn, we haven’t been successful whenever using the microwave. Oh, and let’s not forget the microwave pork grinds. Man, that smell lingered for days.

Although, we have to admit we’ve had some recent successes, like this one, but 99 percent of the time we screw up somehow.

Included with the DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust Pizza was a…Um…Crisping contraption, which we think is a black paint job and a few spikes away from being a S&M collar, but that might only be us.

After putting the pizza in the crisping contraption, we put all of that into the microwave and baked it for the recommended six minutes on HIGH. We wanted to watch it to see if the crust would rise, but we remembered what our moms said growing up, “If you stare into the microwave, your palms will grow hair.”

Or was that something else.

Anyway, we let the pizza sit for the few minutes after it was done baking. After tasting it, we have to say that this is the best microwave pizza we ever had that we didn’t screw up. It was like we baked it in a conventional oven and didn’t screw up.

The only major problem we had with it was the price. Spending $4.29 for a seven-inch pizza (don’t ask how we measured it) seemed a bit expensive. If they were on sale or cheaper, we would definitely buy them more often.

We wonder if Alisa will reimburse us.

Item: DiGiorno Microwave Rising Crust Pizza: Three Meat Pizza
Purchase Price: $4.29
Rating: 8 out of 10
Pros: Crisping contraption worked well. Oven baked taste. No, really, it had an oven baked taste. We didn’t cause it to burn, melt, or explode.
Cons: Outer crust was kind of hard. Expensive.