Picked this bad boy up for a night when my wife didn’t feel like cooking, and when that day inevitably arrived, I popped it in the oven. Usually, chicken on these pizzas are pretty lacking, but the rest looked so good that I was hoping it would make up for it.
The first thing you’ll notice is the size of the crust…it’s monstrous. Maybe you won’t notice it when taking it out of the packaging, but you’ll certainly notice it after it pops out of the oven. I prefer my pizza to be more pizza than crust, but as with a couple of the other Mama Cozzi’s pizzas that I’ve had, this reverses the formula. For its part, it’s different, at least at first–it has a little bit of a sweetness that takes away from the bland drudgery of chewing on crust. But that little characteristic gets old pretty quickly, and before long they still just become boring, chewy, dry pieces of unnecessary bread. Even dipping them in ranch, my go-to for added flavor, didn’t add much to my excitement. If that doesn’t work, nothing will.
The pizza itself is pretty good, but again, there just doesn’t feel like there’s a whole lot to go around. The cheese, which is a mixture of four different ones, are sufficient, and I really liked the tomatoes. As I stated earlier, chicken usually doesn’t add much to these pizzas, and this one was no exception. While I felt like they had a little bit more flavor than most, they still didn’t add much at all. Maybe I was just so hungry, because the next day after reheating these pieces, they just felt like a weird unnecessary texture, while contributing absolutely nothing else.
I forget what I paid for this, but I think it was $3.99, which is the norm for Aldi’s frozen pizzas. Even in that price range, you could do a lot better. Hell, I much prefer their cheapo $1.99 frozen pizzas to this one. Or, for a dollar or two more, you can get one of their consistently-excellent take and bakes. This pizza isn’t so bad that it’s offensive or inedible, just hugely underwhelming.
Overall: 5/10. The cheese and tomatoes are pretty good, but that’s about the end of the praise for me. The chicken is mildly seasoned but overall unnecessary, and the crust is overwhelming, both in its size, and in its blandness. Reheated the next day (the true test of a pizza’s flavor) everything was even worse. It’s not a terribly awful pizza, per se, just a terribly underwhelming one, as a lot of Mama Cozzi’s pizzas are above-average. This one is a special buy, but I would much rather prefer their cheapo $2 pizzas to this; if you’re looking for something a little more “upscale”, just about any of their take and bake pizzas will do the trick, and for just a couple of dollars more.
