80. Frozen: Off-the-Rack

It’s a really wide range of frozen pizzas out on the market today, so clumping them together might not make a lot of sense unless you’re staring down writing a review on all 200+ varieties. So we’re gonna deal in some generalities with this one, and point out a few positive and negative outliers in the pack. Truth is, we’re not great at baking frozen pizzas. While there’s probably not a lot at stake while prepping a standard-issue frozen, our collective lack of skill and attention turns this into a classic high risk/low reward dinner gambit, because something always seems to go wrong. If it’s not burnt around the perimeter, it has improperly melted cheese biproduct at the core. That’s not unusual for me, but wife is usually pretty handy around the kitchen. Her biggest drawback, however, is she inexplicably will go into slumps with certain foods. She’s a master bread maker, but a while back, she lost her touch and everything just turned to a doughy lump. For years, she excelled at home-made pizza (which I will NOT be reviewing) but for no apparent reason, the crust stopped working properly, then the sauce turned out wrong, and then she couldn’t get the baking time right, and… oh boy, I better just stop right there. My point is, when given little room for error, as a frozen pizza is wont to do, the absolute worst people to elevate its humble qualities would be either one of us.

But here are just a few that would rank much higher if judged separately:

Heggie’s

Home Run Inn

LotzaMozza

And a few that greatly benefit by being clustered in this “group” assignment:

Tombstone

Red Baron

Tony’s

Anything with Cauliflower Crust

These would be your 1-star options. Here’s a hypothetical situation: you are offered premium tickets to a major sporting event in your city if you are willing to also combine it with four pizza dinners–all for the price of $10. Seems like a deal too good to pass up, right? Well, using simplistic deductive skills and also reading the title to this entry, you already know part of this story, and indeed, all is not what it seems. Of course, this was not a hypothetical situation–I was a victim of this elaborate flimflam, and remain somewhat haunted by all that transpired to this very day. The pizzas were Tombstone frozen pizzas, and the tickets turned out to be for a Timberwolves-Pistons game in April 2013. The teams were playing out the final days of a dreary season with dreary players in a dreary arena among dreary fans. The pizzas, however, were not quite so good. And that night, I realized that frozen pizza and the Timberwolves were basically the same item: a product that meets enough basic, moral, and legal obligations to be a considered a marginal sub-brand that rides the coattails of something much greater than their own product.

How could I possibly come away from this implied contract disappointed with either the Tombstones or the Wolves? I was not coerced or intimidated into this; I acted on my own free will, and I chose poorly.

As the executioner asks in the 90s TV commercial: “So what do you want on your Tombstone?”