In my experience with frozen pizza, the ones with less ingredients are better. Any frozen vegetables will go watery, so your options are really pepperoni or plain cheese. You want a pizza with a nice thin base
Let the pizza defrost for a little bit with the wrapper off before you put it in the oven, then blast it in the oven at maximum temperature.
It helps if you put the pizza on a pizza stone or on a rack, rather than on a tray. If it's on a tray, the bottom tends to get soggy.
(Geez, I sound like a shill. After 5 years and 8000+ HN karma, Red Baron's sockpuppet account finally pays off!)
As another example: the budget branded fries that I brought for $2 for a kg came from the Netherlands. Not only was I amazed that it was cheaper than locally made fries, but that was cheaper than I could buy fresh potatoes.
Somehow it's cheaper to grow potatoes, cut them up, package them, and ship them to New Zealand, than it is to grow potatoes in New Zealand and drive them to the supermarket.
Looking at ballpark estimates, potato chips weigh about 500 kg/m^3 [1], meaning you can fit 27 t in a shipping container [2] with some space left over, as 27 t is the maximum weight for a 40 ft container. This would cost around $4,500 to ship from Rotterdam to Auckland in a refrigerated container [3].
So per 1 kg packet, you're looking $0.17 for shipping costs. That's pretty astoundingly low.
[1] http://www.mpd-inc.com/bulk-density/
[2] http://www.dsv.com/sea-freight/sea-container-description/dry...
Unless your point is that the shipping is cheap in absolute terms, in which case 'yes' :) Although I don't think it will add much. Say pizzas are shipped 500 km, on average (for the North Island - most of them will stay in Auckland, and I imagine those going to Wellington are shipped there directly). Either way, transport like that will cost you, say Eur 1/NZD 1.75/USD 1.15 per kilometer? (IIRC from the time I worked for a transport company). But you can fit, say, 50k of them in a truck. That's 1-2 cents depending on which currency you look at, and that's using lowball estimates, and not using bulk shipping discounts.
It's amazing and completely counter-intuitive how cheap shipping is. Which is also why I so dislike the 'food miles' concept. Yes, it's 3k km to drive lettuce from Spain to Northern Europe. But you can fit so many of them in a truck, that the per-item cost is tiny, and quite often offsets the extra costs you'd have to make to grow that same lettuce up north. And yes that's even when calculating in the environmental costs (depending of course on the crop and the time of year; my point: just having fewer 'food miles' doesn't necessarily make it better for the environment).
I cook from frozen normally, but for a really "gourmet" frozen pizza experience defrost is completely and stick it under the grill. Wonderful grilled cheese on top and still a soft fluffy base underneath.
I'm constantly impressed with the quality of Aldi food for how insanely cheap it is, especially their frozen goods. I can eat well for $5 per day on Aldi food.
I had to look it up to make sure you meant (US: bell) peppers.
>The large, mild form is called bell pepper, or by color or both in North America and the United Kingdom, but typically called capsicum in New Zealand,[8] Australia, South Africa, Singapore, and India.
It does seem strange that even anglosphere countries in the eastern hemisphere ended up with a different name for some reason. Presumably it was also called that in the UK at some point too.
Some other differences in Australian and UK usage are zucchini vs courgette and eggplant vs aubergine. Not much of a French influence down-under. And Italian immigrants dominated Melbourne's fruit and veg trade in the 1960s.
Perhaps it became common in all of these countries at the same time, long after colonisation, leading to different marketing/naming between these countries.
This seems backwards. The hotter the oven, the less time for the heat to diffuse inwards before the outside is burnt. The lower the temperature, the more even the heat.
I'd imagine the reason not to put it before it's done preheating is standardization. If my oven takes 5 minutes and yours takes 10 to get to 400, there's no way to write one single set of directions for how long to cook it from the time of powering it on. It's hard enough with everyone's different freezer temperatures.
PS, I found best results with a bit of microwave first (to unfreeze the inside, the microwaves do penetrate quite well) and then to the oven.
You can't bake good napolitan pizza at home but you can bake decent pizza at home as long as you change the recipe to be nontraditional. I make a very wet dough, let it rise, then spread it on olive oil greased sheets, rise again then pre bake the crust until it is firm enough to put on the toppings then bake again. The crust is like a thin focaccia.
Yes you can. Good dough, high thermal mass (baking steel) and thorough preheating are the most important points.
"Oh, but it doesn't get to 350/400/a quadrillion degrees like a real pizza oven does!" the peanut gallery cries.
A lot of great pizzarias don't bake their pizzas above ~300 anyway. Just turn your oven way up and let it preheat properly. It is not properly heated when the indicator bulb turns off. Give it at least another 15 minutes to get the baking surface thoroughly warmed through. If water droplets don't show the Leidenfrost effect on the baking surface, it is nowhere near hot enough.
Ingredient (grams) 1 Pie 3 Pied 5 Pies
Filtered Water 110 330 550
King Arthur Bread flour 168 510 850
Kosher or Sea Salt 6 18 30
Sourdough yeast culture 15 45 60
Instant Dry yeast 0.5 1.5 2.5
All ingredients into mixer except 25% of flour.
Mix on lowest speed for 1-2 minutes or until completely blended.
Cover and Let it rest for 20 minutes.
Start Mixing on Low speed for 8 minutes. 5 minutes into it start adding held back flour gradually.
Mix for 1 more minute
Divide in to 300g balls and either let raise warm (3-10 hours) or cold (2-7 days).Highly recommend though I believe the author is located in the Pacific Northwest, and one thing I have found is nearly all recipes should have their hydration ratios adjusted to your local climate. Local humidity / seasons tend to have impacts on dough.
To use, just take it out a few hours ahead of time so that it can warm up to RT and rise again.
Yes, aside from high heat the cold ferment step seems to play a big role: https://slice.seriouseats.com/2010/09/the-pizza-lab-how-long...
* Use bread flour
* Let it sit refrigerated for a few days before use. 1-2 weeks is pretty ideal.
Compared to a fresh dough, you'll get that nice crispy crust and chewy, flavorful interior.
Too much beyond that the dough will break down too much, becoming gooey, tearing easily when handled, and resulting in a hard/crunchy crust.
Proofed dough balls can be frozen for storage, however. They keep well in the freezer and defrost quickly when needed.
As someone who's cracked several conventional baking stones, I would be seriously surprised if the Slab O' Steel doesn't outlast me. I can highly recommend getting one, it's definitely worth it.
takes a long time to heat up, but when it does pizza cooks like its supposed to, and the oven temp springs back quickly after you close the door.
inexpensive and pretty durable. highly recommend.
You don't really need it, you can produce extremely good pizzas in an ordinary oven, as long as you remember to preheat it and have enough thermal mass in your baking stone/steel. Once the oven reaches temp, give it at least another 15 minutes to really preheat the stone.
Preheating and a good dough have been the key ingredients for me. That and a hefty 8kg baking steel. Metal retains more heat and dumps it a lot quicker into the crust than a traditional backing stone.
sorry for slow answer
They have a heated stone base and large electrical elements in the lid. You have to be careful not to cook it too fast -- you turn it right down between pizzas.
Downside is they only do one at a time but that's usually fine.
[edit - the one we have is very similar to this: New Wave NWKA 1200W Stone Bake Just Pizza Maker (Red) ]
They're a like a bread maker in that regard. They seem super useful, but just never get used.
I use my bread maker almost every day, sometimes twice. I dismantled the table top pizza oven because it was useless and now I just use the stone from it in the oven.
I suspect I am an outlier in the bread maker statistics :-)