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When you get home late from work and don't have the energy to cook dinner, and don't feel like spending the money on eating out or delivery, frozen meals can be lifesavers. I always have a few in my freezer for nights just like these. After a rough day, my favorite frozen meal is often a frozen pizza, but many of them have cardboard-like crusts and uninspired toppings. Whole Foods Market offers several frozen pizzas, and their Stracchino and Arugula is exotic and delicious sounding.

Plus, the arugula gives some element of health and nutrition.

Frozen Schiacciata Style Pizza

There are lots of frozen pizzas out there, and even several promising a step above simple tomato sauce and cheese. But Whole Foods Market's Wood-Fired Pizza: Stracchino and Arugula is on a whole other level. When I saw it at Whole Foods, I was instantly intrigued by the bright green arugula and exotically named cheese (turns out stracchino cheese is a soft and mild Italian cow's milk cheese), as well as the promise that this was a "schiacciata style pizza." Schiacciata literally means "flattened" or "squashed" in Italian and this type of pizza from Tuscany has a thin, crispy crust. I'd never seen it frozen before and was skeptical about how good it would taste reheated in my oven at home, even if they promised it was "made in Friuli, Italy" and "baked in a wood-fired oven."

Into the Oven

After a quick perusal of the simple directions, I preheated my pizza stone in the oven--the directions make sure to mention to do that if you are using a pizza stone, already indicating the superior level of pizza making at hand.

I was slightly dismayed to see the small size of the pizza when I took it out of the box (it's only 10 inches) so if you're feeding more than two (or one really hungry person) you'll need a few of these. After my oven was fully heated, I slid it onto the stone and waited about 13 minutes, when the cheese was bubbling and the crust was brown around the edges. The smell was pretty intoxicating and even the frozen arugula was bright green and fresh looking.

Taste Test

But the real question is, how did it taste? The answer is, pretty delicious. The crust was crispy and crunchy, just like a schiacciata should be, the cheese was mild but flavorful with a delightfully creamy texture, and the arugula offered a pleasant bitterness to cut the creamy cheese. Usually I find myself missing tomato sauce when I eat a white pizza, as this one is, but this time I didn't even think about it. I think it was because the pizza wasn't dry at all, which can often be the downfall of a sauceless white pizza. A quick glance at the ingredient list taught me this pizza is helped along by mascarpone cheese and the fact that the stracchino cheese is actually listed as "stracchino cheese sauce" in the ingredients, which accounted for the creamy layer between the melted cheese and the crispy crust. Hey, whatever works!

After Dinner Musings

All in all, this frozen pizza is worth every penny and succeeds in elevating the frozen pizza to gourmet status. Cooking it was as easy as can be and it tasted fantastic and authentic--not something you often hear about frozen foods. My only gripe? It was a little smaller than I'd like--more of a large personal pie, especially because the crust is so thin.