The Frozen Pizza Challenge: Chapter One

Due to pressure from a specific subsection of my fan-base, I'm going to talk about Japanese pizza. In case you haven't heard, it's terrible, for the most part. Being the sort of person who claims Chicago as my adopted hometown I'm certainly not an impartial judge. However, disregarding my membership in one of the world's great pizza civilizations, there are certain conventions on which we can base our analysis. Japanese pizza breaks from pizza tradition in the following ways:

The toppings: Yes, squid and corn pizza is one of the more popular combinations here (it's not that bad, actually). Some places will even substitute squid ink for pizza sauce at the customer's request. I know this sounds like a joke but it's not.

The ratio of its components: They tend to like a lot of cheese here and not very much sauce. Being the type of person who often orders a pie with extra cheese and light on the sauce, this sits well with me.

The crust: It tends to be far less crispy, even on thin crust pizzas. This is especially true of frozen pizzas, although the blame may lie with Japanese "ovens" rather than the pizzas themselves. More on this later.

The size: The slices are basically more like slivers. Kisuke apparently gasped in terror after seeing the size of slices at the Pizza Hut located on the American military base in Misawa. Frozen pizzas are much smaller as well, being more single than LP in terms of size.

Now having said this, I've actually had terrific pizza here. On Friday night, I was talked into an Italian joint in Aomori City that had excellent cracker-crust pizza. If I was served this pizza in America I would undoubtedly think it was good. However, if I paid $20 for it in America, I would have complained loudly.

But we all know that the real test is frozen pizza. As difficult as it is to bake a good pizza, it's almost impossible to produce a good frozen pizza. While I have my trusted brands in America, I have no idea what to buy here. Thus, in what may prove to be a continuing series, I have decided to review the frozen pizzas that I have consumed thus far.

Brand: La Pizza
Toppings: Some strange pepperoni/sausage hybrid
Price: about $4


My first Japanese pizza making experience was confusing and un-fulfilling. It's worth noting that this wasn't really a frozen pizza, it was actually refrigerated (in hindsight, that should have been enough of a warning for me). There are no ovens in Japan like we have in America. Instead, microwaves double as ovens of some sort. Having been shown briefly by Charlie how to operate such a device, I decided to give it my best shot.

From what I could read, the directions instructed me to bake the pizza at 250 degrees Celsius for 5-7 minutes.

I set the "oven" for the correct temperature and waited for some sort of sign that it had preheated. Once it beeped, I put the pizza in. Upon opening the door of the device, the temperature dropped to 230. No matter what I did, I could not get it to go back up to 250. So I decided to leave the pizza in for a few extra minutes to compensate.

This turned out to be a mistake. As you can probably tell from the picture, it came out a little burned although not horribly so.

My main problem with this pizza was the crust, which on the underside had the firmness of soft bread. It was definitely done though, just really soft. Was this the fault of the pizza, the oven, or my inability to cook the thing at the correct temperature? I'm going to blame the pizza.
Final Grade: D
The pizza on the American Airlines flight over was better. Seriously.

Brand: Top Valu
Toppings: Supreme (or "mixed" as the bag calls it)
Price: about $6

This pizza was more expensive but much better. I was surprised to find a pizza that was not only frozen but that also had what I considered to be fairly normal toppings. The "Top Value" brand is actually Jusco's generic brand but as far as I can tell, they make the only actual frozen pizzas to be found at Jusco. Unfortunately, I had the same strange temperature problem while cooking this one. I decided to err on the side of caution this time, which resulted in a small section of the center being cold. It looked done to me, though.

This one had the same disappointing softness of crust but the cheese and toppings were far superior. The pepperoni wasn't quite like the American stuff but was passable. Overall, not a bad effort.

Final Grade: B-
Not good and not bad but somewhere in-between.