Pizza Project - Day 6

At last we arrive at the final pizza in the experiment.

This is a radical shift from the last couple thin pizzas.  The Screamin' Sicilian weighs in at almost a pound and a half (666 grams).  A meat combo, this pizza puts a twist on the pepperoni and sausage combos that have been prevalent in the experiment.  The twist being the sausage is in the form of meatballs cut in half, and the pepperoni slices have been replaced with rough cut pepperoni.

Perhaps a picture is in order.

You can see the meatballs cut in half and rough cut is about the only way to describe the pepperoni.  Making a count of pepperoni to compare this to the other pizzas would be pointless- just glancing at it shows much less pepperoni here.  The sausage meatballs have taken the lead; this is a sausage and pepperoni pizza, not the reverse.

As we gaze now at the baked pizza, let us consider the stats.

Price: $9.99 (the range was $5 to $9.99)

Calories: 310 for 1/5 of a pizza (387.5 for two sizes of a pizza cut 8 ways).

Cooking Temp: 400 F. That converts to about 204.4 C. 

Cooking Time: The instructions call for 20 to 22 minutes.  I went with 21, midway in the range).

So how did it taste?  Not my favorite.  The marking folks set a high bar describing the sauce as "thick rich robust tomato sauce", but it was bland.  The italian meat balls were a bit off, and the rough chopped pepperoni didn't add enough to bring this pizza back in line.  Maybe it was just an off night, maybe a different ingredient combo would be better, but as the high cost leader this was a disappointment.

And that is it for the pizza experiment!  There's more numbers that could be crunched, in particular digging into the weight differences (they ranged from 536g to 775g).  There wasn't much talk in the taste reviews about tomato sauces, these also varied but not as much as expected.  Could a stand out sauce move a low performing pizza up the charts? And there's more that could be said about packaging.  But for now I'm going to wrap it up and just say there's a lot of variety out there, maybe mixing it up is the best approach to picking your next frozen pizza.