Frozen pizza. You've likely eaten it all your life. If you're like me and most people, you enjoyed it a lot more as a kid than as an adult, once you realized that fresh pizza in a good pizzeria is so much better.
With that in mind, anyone reading this probably has a pizza in the freezer right now. For me, it started with Ellio's, which was a monstrous leap forward over the Chef Boy-ar-dee home pizza kits of the 1960s. Lots of progress since then, of course. It's almost never great, but it can be pretty good, especially if you augment with things like extra garlic, good cure meats, or fresh basil.
Every analysis needs a baseline, and for me, the standard isDiGiorno Rising Crust frozen pizza. First introduced to the masses in 1995, but not many frozen pizzas have surpassed it. Not only is it my measuring stick for frozen pizza, but also for bottom-line pizzeria offerings. Sadly, some places (ahem, Papa John) can't make a pizza as good as a frozen DiGiorno.
Recent years have seen some upstart frozen pizzas that eclipse DiGiorno pretty easily. Some store brands feature frozen pizzas made in Germany or Italy (ALDI, Trader Joe's) and they are generally superior to the mass market stuff. Up to this point, the best frozen pizza I have had is Roberta's, based on the fabulous Neapolitan pies made in the original Roberta's Pizzeriain Bushwick (Brooklyn) NY.
When I recently went back to the frozen pizza section at Whole Foods (where I found the Roberta's pie a few years earlier), I discovered a frozen pizza offering from Table 87, made in Brooklyn. This was a single slice of very nice looking pizza in a clear wrapper. $6 for a big 5 ounce slice is pricy for frozen pizza, but I figured I'd gladly pay that at a premium NYC slice place. So I brought some home.
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Owner Tom Cucco was selling his coal-fired pizza by the slice in New York and wanted to grow the business, and he secured an appearance on Shark Tank. He didn't get the funding right away, but by 2022 his frozen pizza was available in markets like Wegman's and Whole Foods.
The Shark Tank Recap website concludes:
"By mid-2024, retail expansion reached Harris Teeter, Central Markets, Fresh Markets, and Thrive Markets. At the time of this writing, Table 87 now generates $5 million in annual revenue. While the Shark Tank deal never happened, Table 87 has built a solid business with strong retail partnerships and a dedicated customer base."
The only style available in my local store was a "plain" slice with plum tomato sauce, mozzarella, and a leaf of fresh basil. I heated it as instructed, 400 degree in a preheated baking pan for 5-7 minutes. I like crisp pizza, so I went the full 7 minutes.
This big slice had a great fresh flavor. The cheese looked like fresh mozz but tasted like conventional aged mozzarella, applied plentifully but not so much as to overwhelm the crust. The sauce had a very nice tang. There was just one solo basil leaf that was a nice touch, but you lose much of its value when it gets baked with the pizza.
The dough was like a flattened, denser Neapolitan. In other words, all of the flavor, some of the texture, but without the flop! It was very good and could have been great and properly crisped with a longer bake. When I buy this again (and I will), I will bake it for 8-10 minutes, not the recommended 5-7 minutes.
Evven though the flavors were good and in harmony, I felt it lacked punch. Of course any cured meat topping would fix that; I made it a LOT better by adding a little salt.
Despite some room for improvement, this is as good as frozen pizza gets; it's at least as good as the frozen Roberta's pizza. We've come a long way on the journey to "great pizza not from a pizzeria" with frozen pie this good and the incredible "Pinsa" style take-and-bake in the deli section at Costco.