Frozen pizza is fine. It is one of the least ambitious and yet completely decent meals you can make with almost no effort. But why not aim for more than decent? With a few added toppings, you can upgrade your cardboard pizza to something resembling an actual meal.
Image by Daniel Oines (Flickr).
Over on Bon Appétit, five professional chefs shared their tips for how they would improve a frozen pizza. The recurring theme amid their suggestions is to add toppings with strong flavours; garlic in particular is a common recommendation. Hannah and Marian Cheng, co-founders of Mimi Cheng’s in New York, explain:
Fresh garlic on pizza can make a huge flavour difference; thinly slice fresh garlic and lay them on top of the pizza before it’s put in the oven. If the cooking time is too long and you’re worried about the garlic burning before the pizza is cooked through, you can also sauté the garlic in olive oil and drizzle the garlic-infused olive oil on the pizza after.
Others suggest things like pepperoncini or even chorizo, and pretty much every chef recommends adding better cheese to doctor up your pizza. And — a surprise to me — a few chefs also suggest honey. Head over to Bon Appétit for the full rundown on making your pizza more than mediocre.
5 Chefs on How They’d Doctor Up Frozen Pizza [Bon Appétit via BoingBoing]
Comments
5 responses to “How Professional Chefs Upgrade Frozen Pizza”
If you need to do that much to improve a frozen pizza it’s best to just get a pizza base and do the rest yourself from scratch add it’ll be cheaper and with better ingredients.
I’m with you. The reason frozen pizzas are terrible is the base. It’s far easier to keep a pre-cooked base in the fridge or freezer and improve it with tomato paste, cheese and whatever you have lying around.
Agreed. The crappy cardboard base and the tomato paste that probably glows in the dark can’t be fixed.
Fresh cheese and mixed herbs makes any frozen pizza better, i quite often buy Aldi frozen pizza’s and chuck on some grated cheese, some mixed herbs and any meat if i have some leftovers and they always turn out so delicious.
The problem with most frozen pizza’s is that when they are cooked they are so dry.
We are fortunate to live close to an Italian family-owned pizza shop producing a large range of real pizzas which we order by telephone.for pick up. Delivered, mass produced pizzas is mere convenience, but buying frozen then having to buy and add ingredients to create a half-decent pizza is one of the the most ridiculous, ludicrous wastes of time and money.