When selecting a frozen pizza from your local grocery store freezer section, instinct and experience will tell you that it is just a f***ing pizza, buy whatever the Hell you want. Well, as with the moment when you first donned a pair of Zubbas with a Hyper Color shirt, thinking that it was the peak of fashion, your instincts are wrong.
The average stupid person will assume that all frozen pizzas are made the same. Leave these people a wide berth. Easily irritated. Easily taunted. Found most frequently within the florescent world of Walmart. They tend to startle easily and will lash out when you least expect them. With luck you can get a quick cell phone pic of their mullet and post in online to the joy and mockery of others. Common sense should indicate that if you are in a grocery store and you see a person with a frozen pizza, they care little of their health, personal appearance or the state of their lower intestine.
These people will shop for a frozen pizza with a coupon, or look for sale prices. 10 for $10 or something of that sort. However, if the person indulging on this financial oasis is not a college student or possessing a license for their glaucoma medicine, they are dullards.
True frozen pizza aficionados can only be found at the Midwestern staple of food economy and capitalism: Target Superstore. A place made up of 1 part grocery and 3 parts crap I don't care about. Hidden, usually in the furthest corner of these wondrous monuments of progressive thinking is the frozen foods aisle. Looking much as any frozen foods aisle, it may not be easily discernible from the hundreds one has travel through before. But there, typically three to four doors down can be found the Target brand Market Pantry Pizza. A true feat of culinary structural engineering.
For a paltry $2.99 (this is for the full fat version, if you really want to waste 20 cents on the "whole wheat" version just to feel better about how fat your already are, go ahead, but don't expect me to hold your hand while you weep at the middle-of-the-night realization that the special claw that is sold specifically for assisting the morbidly obese to wipe their ass is now within your limited reach)... crap, lost my train of thought.
How does it taste? Again, you ask the wrong question. It would be wrong to judge a pizza of this type based on taste. It sets one apart as a layman, too near-sighted to see true genius. No, for this we will need some advanced mathematical calculations followed by the only true way to prepare and consume such beautiful... damn it, ran out of fancy sounding nouns. This is good sh*t.
The key when selecting a pizza, any pizza, is the weight to cost ratio. At the bottom of every frozen pizza is the weight, broken down in pounds, ounces and even grams (showing that Target truly understands their own international appeal). First, always look at cost. Anything over $5 isn't worth it. Rising crust? I hate you. Air filled pockets creating the illusion of increased substance. You sicken me in ways that only the heavily eye-shadowed antics of Cris Angel Mindf**k can.
For the purposes of this article we will specifically discussing the merits of the Market Pantry Pepperoni Pizza. Pepperoni being the topic of choice for several reasons. First, the difference between what could be considered good pepperoni versus bad pepperoni is small, if not nonexistent. Unlike other meats or vegetables, there is a good chance that all pepperoni is made at the same facility, that place most likely being the Twinkie's factory as I believe that along with Twinkies, cockroaches and Joan Rivers' face, pepperoni will survive nuclear war.
Second, because pepperoni is as American a pizza topping as you can get. Sure, you can argue cheese as its own topping and your argument has merit, but as cooking time and preparation chances for pizza sans pepperoni, this argument is moot. Sausage, or what is called sausage should not be discussed. Vegetables... you know what? If you get deluxe frozen pizzas, just stop reading. It does me a disservice. You have even few taste buds than I do and are even less interested in your expanding waist line. You sicken me.
Pepperoni is the ultimate equalizer in frozen pizzas. It all tastes the same so you know that even if the pizza itself is bad, you can look forward to the occasional mouthful of that wonderfully peppered mystery meat. It can multi-task in salads, sandwiches and Blood Marys. It can be used to make shapes like hearts on Valentines Day or a Pumpkin on Halloween. It can be used to make crude words that slide together once cooked and are illegible when cut. Of course, these tend to be the same people that find it romantic to propose on a Jumbo-Tron, so if the message "Cletus + Sally Mae" is lost forever, it won't be too great of a loss.
Here's the math (for which we will be using price, mass and volume to break it down, those with public school educations or a work shirt with your name embroidered on the breast pocket, breath deep, it will be okay):
We will be using for our base of comparison a DiGiorno Frozen Pizza as it seems to have become a staple for "decerning" frozen pizza eaters and people that love product commercials that bash you over the head.
Market Pantry (MP) has a volume of 47.49 square inches. Volume is equal to Pi (3.14159...) times the radius squared (5.5 x 5.5= 30.25) times height (.5 inches).
DiGiorno (D) has a volume of 94.985 (3.14159 x 30.25 x 1.0). All measurements were of the pizza I bought. If your figures come out different you can **** my ****.
So far, it seems like DiGiorno is the way to go for the hungry consumer. But wait, there's more.
The weight of MP is 21.6 ounces. That is .45 ounces per square inch.
The weight of D is 28.3 ounces. That is .298 ounces per square inch. Double the volume, but only 31% heavier. The plot thickens.
MP retails for $2.99
Digiorno for $5.99. Double the price. Double the volume without a directly correlated weight. What does it all mean? You are pay for air.
MP is the neutron star of frozen pizzas. Where it was once the Digiorno like supernova, now has collapsed under it's own mass to create a super dense substance that falls somewhere between Tungston and Polonium on the Periodic Table.
What does all this mean? How the f*** should I know? But it took me forever to write so you sure as hell were going to read it before getting to the important stuff.
To cook, PREHEAT THE OVEN! I'm sorry, I didn't mean to yell. However, I feel it is necessary for those of you that get mad that your crust is not crispy, yet still put your pizza in an unheated oven. Or, almost as bad, leave the pizza on the counter to thaw.
Cook, as directed, at 400 degrees for 15 minutes. Once time has elapsed, turn off the oven and hit the broiler. Time to fry the bastard. We want crispy, golden brown cheese like substance on the top. Crispy top and bottom. Like a pizza flavored potato chip we want this bad boy to have a little crunch.
Once cooking is complete, let rest momentarily on counter while preparing the rest of the materials you will need:
1. Salt- yup, Kosher if you got it. The sodium content on that back can't be right. There can't be that much salt on this pizza. Better to be safe, dust it like you are adding that fake snow crap to a Christmas tree.
2. Frank's Red Hot Sauce- that's right, I put this sh*t on everything, because the old lady on the commercial told me to and I respect my elders.
3. Cheap beer- I can't emphasize this one enough. If you buy beer that costs as much for a 6-pack of bottles as it does for a 24-pack of cans for the cheapest beer in the place, you paid too much to use on this food. High life, Grain Belt or something light. Don't waste the good stuff. If you insist on drinking Guinness then you will have to explain why you spent more money on one can of beer than you did on the entire pizza.
If you want wine with your frozen pizza, I hope you get stabbed in the face with a spork. Don't get me wrong, I don't wish for you to endure physical harm, hence my choice of weapon, I merely wish for you to suffer the indignity of having to live the rest of your life being "that person that got stabbed in the face with a spork".
3. A chef's knife- preferrably a good one, but if you got yours from Chef Tony at 3am like I did, that's okay too. This is in place of a pizza wheel. You will understand why soon enough.
4. A napkin or paper towel- yes, we are as the Cohen brothers pointed out a bunch of ya-you-betcha's, but that doesn't mean that we have to be smeared with sauce like heathens.
Now, allow the pizza to cool. Important for cutting. A hot pizza, when cut, acts like an ice rink with Minnesota Wild failure James Shepard on it. It just slides around and makes a mess of an otherwise good thing.
This is what happens regardless of cooling time with a Digiornio pizza. The cheese sliding into the cracks created by the cutting apparatus. Disappearing to a netherworld only populated by that one sock you lose every time you do the laundry. The resulting pizza surface resembling more the bottom of a marathon runner's foot than something appetizing.
Once cool, using the chef's knife, cut the pizza in half. Then, on each side of the first cut, make three more parrellel cuts. Turn the pizza 90 degrees and repeat. This will create an eight by eight piece grid to work from.
Without the chef's knife this process would be difficult if not impossible to perform without the inevitable creation of a pizza crust projectile from the tiny corner piece. It's destination unknown, it's mission nothing short of nefarious.
Liberally coat each individual piece with Frank's Red Hot Sauce. Allow little, if any cheese to show through.
Start eating, using your fork, from the inside, out. Eventually getting to the little nugget outer pieces. Use the small amount of crust as a handle and continue in a circle until complete.
If you drank less than two beers in the process, there wasn't enough hot sauce on the pizza. Start again with a new pizza.
What does any of this have to do with anything? Simple, it will add eccentricity and excitement to your otherwise boring life. It is against the status quo of pizza eating. People will judge you, but secretly envy your quest for perfection and adventure even in the face of something as trivial as frozen pizza.
Next Article: Where the f*** am I?
10/10 I have a slightly different take on this quest. I still, however, hold most dear the price per weight golden rule. I eat a strictly frozen pizza diet, so I when I buy ones with veggies, its only because my otherwise perfect world is being infringed upon by sickness and or death. I also purchase concentrated grape juice which I drink with the pizza to make a mockery of fancy Italian restaurants everywhere. The highlight of the article was the intentional typo "You are pay for air."
ReplyDelete