Kashi Roasted Vegetable

Dan's Thoughts

I wish Josh and I could have invited our tree-hugging friends over for a Kashi pizza dinner party tonight. The box was 100% recycled paperboard, using 16% less packaging. In a tip o’ the cap to us, the brand is affiliated with Project Sparky—in purchasing this pizza, we’re saving trees and energy, while also reducing CO₂ gases and waste. The pizza’s vegetarian, too, with nice graphic pictures of whole grains, real vegetables and fruits, and other wholesome looking food on the back of the box. The whole affair was also a little highbrow—with an actual haiku on the side and no dummy pizza pictures on the box showing a mock stove timer or a mock pepperoni pizza on the middle rack. However, my brain functioning returned to low speed when they reminded us in instruction 5 that the “product will be hot” after baking. No shit, Sherlock. I thought we were eating fudgecicles—my bad. And, as I type, I’m periodically glancing at an Arby’s salt packet on the computer workstation.

This pizza falls into my category of “snack” as opposed to meal. I could have eaten the whole pizza by myself for a meal or the half pizza as a snack as it was the smallest to date of any of the pizzas we’ve tried. I secretly timed Josh eating his half and it lasted only 3 minutes 43 seconds. Salt packet. I wasn’t far behind.

Kashi did a lot of things right here and I can’t really find any negatives, save for the size. There’s a general, even disbursement of small roasted vegetable toppings, so you get a little of each of the vegetables in most bites. There’s seasoning in the sauce and the whole grain crust was good and good for your gut (4g of fiber!). The chesses are well-blended. Not much more you can say about this one. If only they packaged it in a Red Baron pizza box, well then I’d be living off Red Baron frozen pizzas every day of my life. (9.3 pizzas out of 10)

By the way, I hope when you’re reading my pizza numerical rating that you’re teleported back to your 6^th grade math class doing fractions and the corresponding decimal conversions. That’s what I think of, at least, when I make the ratings. This pizza would be 93 pizzas out of 100. And weren’t the pizzas always pepperoni in the textbook? Did they have any fire-roasted vegetable pizzas? Arby's.

Joshua's Feelings

Song about Kashi

California Pizza Kitchen: Limited Edition fire roasted vegetables and five cheese

Dans Thoughts

I’m going to be harsh. I’m going to be critical. I’m going to be honest with you. This pizza sucked ass. But there’s a twist for all you curious readers out there…

Here’s my experience with the CPK: I’ve had one of their pizzas in the Phoenix airport waiting for my connecting flight. It was a pepperoni pizza…not bad. There weren’t too many viable options in the airport and it filled my gut until I got to my final destination. But this frozen pizza, oh man, was not a good scene.

I was lured into thinking I was in for a treat with the words “limited edition”, “smoked gouda”, and “pizzas that burst with flavor and personality” and so on. It was the only pizza box in the aisle with a bright yellow box and had an appealing baked pie on the front. When Josh took the pie out of the oven, it really wafted a pleasant odor. I was excited!

The best way to describe the taste of the pizza was like someone sprinkling vinegar on top of it or if the pizza set out too long and the sauce had gone bad. I made it through one piece okay, but cut it off after two. I think the pizza had flavor from the assortment of cheeses and vegetables, but it was masked by the discordant sauce. What the hell does ‘limited edition’ mean, by the way?

Interestingly, this pie contains ‘tamarind’, an African fruit noted for its sweet and sour taste. Google it! What the hell’s it doing here? And who from the CPK thought it was necessary enough to put on this pizza?

It’s getting a low ranking—really low—because I feel like the advertising makes this pie out to be something else. I’ve had a couple of DiGiornio pies, for instance, and I expect there to be a shitty white crust holding everything up. Then you have the pleasant waft. And this pie was not cheap either. I’ll be seeing what else the CPK has to offer, but this pie gets an unheard of ranking. (-1 out of 10 pizzas)

Joshua's Feelings

First off, let’s talk about what “limited edition” means. If you’re a small business and you can only produce X amount of your special product Y, then is it really a limited edition, or is it all you can produce? I would argue that it’s all you have the capacity to produce so small little companies, be they 3 man garage rock bands that can only make 40 copies of there horrible EP or little wine making vineyards that only have so much acreage to produce wine with you’re not producing a special limited edition of something, you’re just doing the best with what you got.

So who can produce limited editions? Bigger companies that want to test out things. So now the question is this, why if you’re a big company would you put out a limited edition of something…. Did the hundreds if not thousands of people you test marketed to all say they were on the fence, was it a hung jury on whether your product was any good? If so, is that how you decide to release something “people said it was average, let’s push it!” Or, did you perhaps make something so horrible and vile that the only way you could think to sell it to people is by saying “this won’t be around long”?

I know Dan laid out the specifics of the CPK’s fire roasted veggie and five cheese pizza. The main issue I had with it is you’re over charging me and taking my hard earned money and you’re not going to tell me what’s in the pizza? You’re going to omit a few details about it and leave me to discover the horrifying truth myself? That’s like getting a reeses pieces blizzard only to discover that some skittles got thrown into the mix.

You wanna know what the CPK fire roasted veg and five cheese experience was like? Let me tell you with a Jesus like metaphor, if Robert Smith of the Cure was Jesus.

Picture this, you’re in high school and you’ve got the hots for this girl Lurchamuck. You start hanging out together as friends and then over the summer you go out on a few dates. There’s no immediate fireworks but you’re both laughing and having a good time with one another so you start to think that its slowly but steadily building into something. Then Lurchamuck invites you to a party she’s having and you tell her “I’ll be there as soon as I can but I have to work that night!”.

Sure enough the day of the party comes and the work day could not drag any slower. You rush home covered in food service funk and you jump in the shower and do your best to wash your pimply high school face and then you rush over to the party, your expectations are overflowing at this point, day dreams pollute your mind of how you’re going to embrace and maybe even kiss her on the cheek at the end of the night.

You rush over to Lurchamucks place, dash up the front door, throw it open and yell “Hey everybody!”

Everyone rushes to greet you and welcome you into the party, but Lurchamuck is nowhere to be found. When you go down into the basement she’s lying in the arms of some other guy who claims to be your friend but always seems to go after whomever you say you’re interested in…. you gotta stop talking to this guy, or at least remember next time to tell him you’re into the girl who smells like moldy cheese… damnit.

Anyhow, that’s what CPK was like, it sold me on its toppings, it’s variety, it’s marketing, and then it led me to a party that was more of a reminder that life just isn’t fair at all.

Oh, and my best guess with the crust is that it’s all made of discarded movie scripts.

0 out of 10 and I’m still left with a chill in my bones every time I walk through the frozen freezer aisle and realize I’ll have to eventually attempt another one of these…

Red Baron Classic Crust Supreme

Dan's Thoughts

I was inspired by the cover art on this pizza box. I’d put the Red Baron (real name: Manfred von Richthofen) in my foxhole any day. With 80 air combat victories, he was considered in WWI as an “ace of aces” in the sky. His real-life look and pizza box mock-up had an air of confidence, as if he just finished his WWI mission and was flying home to have a meal of pizzas and sodas with his men. While the pizza was baking, I imagined I was him, actually capable of growing mustache like the pizza box Baron’s, although in real life, Manfred was without ‘stache. And sadly, it would take me 3.2 years to grow one of my own.

I’m on a mission with this blog entry, so I’ll cut out my usual chit-chat. Rat pellet sausage droppings. A classic crust, which implies to me a more dough-like consistency, was, in actuality, a thin crust. They forgot to make the whole pizza a supreme with about only 65% of the pizza covered in pepperonis. It got the “Real Cheese” logo, so we can feel confident about that, at least. The pizza would probably get a 1 ranking, but the inspired cover art depicting the Baron saves our ace just this one time. Over and out. (2 out of 10 pizzas)

Digorno Rising Crust Pepperoni

Dan's Thoughts

It takes 22 minutes to bake a DiGiornio rising crust pepperoni pizza, but it only took about 12 seconds for my rising expectations to crumble. True, brothers and sisters, there is an element of excitement when you know a yeast dough is expanding and browning in the oven, as if you’ve spent the last hour kneading that dough yourself. But I think the pizza makers at DiGiornio forgot to stock up at the spice rack when they got their ingredients at the supermarket. The dough had no taste and the sauce had no taste. Unless the “flavor scientists” forgot to add the necessary chemicals to both, that is.

The pie is saved by the pepperonis, for sure. They were a nice brick red color, very spherical in nature, and added a degree of flavor to the otherwise wasteland of white dough and undistinguishable red sauce.

Perhaps a technicality, I purchased this pie from the supermarket and dropped it off at Josh’s house before going home, then coming back to his house. Does that make it delivery? Because, as you know, their motto is “It’s not delivery, it’s DiGiornio”. Josh maintains that any time someone buys a DiGiornio pizza, they are technically delivering it to their home every time they return from the supermarket. I certainly delivered, but this pie did not. (1 out of 10 pizzas)

Joshua's Feelings

I bet Dan Mentioned this, but if you have a slogan like "it's not delivery,

it's digorno" aren't you just a jerk? Are you hiding the fact that your slogan has nothing to do with the quality of your product and that you're dodging that issue by attempting to point out the fact that it's convenient?

Still, I had to drive out to the grocery store, and stand behind a woman who couldn't figure out how to work the automatic scanner while her child kicked me in the shins over and over.... it most certainly was not delivery, it was awful.

sure, I made that scenario up. I pieced it together from other grocery store nightmares that have happened, but speaking of nightmares…

If you look in the lower right corner of the digorno box between the phrases "keep frozen" and "cook thoroughly" is the statement "not ready to eat".

I must agree whole heartedly. The Pepperonis were eh... and while the sauce and cheese weren't all that bad the "rising crust" certainly rose up and made its bland season-less presence known throughout each bite which became a bigger chore.

In a recent add for Digorno a roommate is seen attempting to scam his roommate out of his hard earned money by insisting the pizza was delivered and there were several extra charges. In this situation, wouldn't the delivery option just be a better option all together, because at this point the slogan is "it's not delivery, it's your asshole roommate attempting to scam you out of 20 bucks". If I ever encounter a roommate who attempts to pull that scam on me using a pie that is such a lame duck, his body will never be found.

2 out of 10

let's get it started

Let's tell you about what this is.

This is a serious blog. It is as deeply serious as the deep crusts we will be ingesting and our patience for tasteless or poorly constructed freezer pizzas is as thin as the crust they often are made on.

Dan and myself have decided that a worthwhile pursuit and something that can truly help and elevate humanity is reviewing as many if not all of the freezer pizzas that are available to you the consumer so that you don't ever have to enter a grocery freezer section looking for a frozen pizza and left with nagging suspicion that you missed out on something amazing.

Dan and I do our best to document our experiences with each pizza, we make our reviews based on packaging, honestly, integrity, basic human decency, how many pepperonis are actually on a pepperoni pizza, does the sausage look like a rat dropping or an actual sausage, are the baking instructions clear enough to let you the average consumer know how to properly prepare the pizza that you have just purchased so it is a taste bud fulfilling experience, and so on and so on

We want to delve deep into the frozen pizza empire and shake it to its core. We're not endorsed by any frozen pizza company or any company that is attached to one of these pizza empires. Our opinions are solely ours and they are made without bias and without any preconceived notions.

This is our Pizza Blog, hear our voice, hear our truth, become educated, become empowered, let's make this world a better place for you and me and frozen pepperoni