The Low-Effort Lunchables Pizza Hack We Wish We Knew As Kids

Lunchables are packed with nostalgia. As a kid, nothing was better than whipping out one of those yellow-topped plastic trays in the school cafeteria. We all had our favorites, but the Extra Cheesy Pizza variety continuously reigned supreme as one of the most universally desired Lunchables products. I mean, pizza that you could put together yourself? With two kinds of cheese? It was a dream. The enduring magic has even inspired fully grown adults to recreate Pizza Lunchables at home.

But while Pizza Lunchables brought joy, they also brought frustration. Sprinkling shredded cheese onto a tiny disc with clumsy kid fingers is inevitably messy, and a significant amount of salty shreds would always end up on the lunchroom table. As a child, I had no problem with messes, but losing out on precious cheese? That was a tragedy.

Enter the Lunchables Pizza hack from TikTok user Thomas Dowling that has taken the internet by storm. Simply remove the dough discs and sauce pack from an Extra Cheesy Pizza Lunchables and fold the cheese-containing part over to deposit the cheese into the largest section. After slathering red paste on that pale, perforated disc of dough, dip it face down into the cheese. The result is a perfectly cheese-covered pizza without a shred of waste.

@thomasdowling80

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♬ Livin' My Best Life – Dylan Scott

The simple perfection of this hack is almost enough to inspire me to go out and buy a Pizza Lunchables, just to try it for myself. As an adult, I think that this stuff is a crime against pizza — I mean, the cheese isn't even melted. But the appeal of Lunchables, for me at least, was never the taste (which was rarely good). It was the ability to assemble my food myself, to my preference.

If I wanted to, I could take a Ham and Cheddar Lunchables and put all the cheese between two crackers like a charcuterie version of Burger King's Real Cheese Burger. I was a chef, and the power was in my hands. So the frustration of spilling cheese on the table hit my Lunchables-inflated ego especially hard.

This Lunchables Pizza hack might seem trivial — I mean, it's a few shreds of Kraft blend cheese, what's the big deal? Well, first of all, there's nothing trivial about saving cheese. More importantly, it puts the power back into the Lunchables eater's hands. You can harness physics and gravity to assemble strange room-temperature pizza perfectly, and it's wonderful.