Does Defrosting Your Frozen Pizza Really Make A Difference?

The beauty of frozen pizza is that you're able to have a hot, sustaining, delicious meal without much forethought. If you arrive home too wiped out to cook dinner — or if eating out is too pricey a proposition — just throw a pizza in the oven, wait about 20 minutes, and you're all set. But while a frozen pizza is a marvel of convenience food, could it be improved with a little extra prep time? We've decided to ignore most frozen pizza directions and see if a thawed pizza brings more flavor to the dining table.

Reviewing frozen pizza is well-traveled ground at The Takeout. After contemplating an attempt to find a Home Run Inn frozen pizza after reading its endorsement (yes, Dennis Lee, they sell them in California) and pondering if we should try a healthier frozen pizza, for this test we decided to go with the most-recently crowned frozen pizza champ by Takeout colleagues: DiGiorno Rising Crust Pepperoni Pizza.

What a difference two years can make. Since the publication of the glowing review above, this type of Rising Crust pizza earned a glow-up into Ultimate Pepperoni. Apparently, what makes the pepperoni "ultimate" is that it's made with a combo of beef, pork, and chicken. We'll see if this franken-pep will behave itself upon defrosting.

The directions for the DiGiorno Rising Crust Ultimate Pepperoni only indicate to cook from frozen. Easy enough: Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit, remove the pizza from its box and wrapping, place it on the oven rack, and bake for 19 minutes.

Discerning how long to defrost a frozen pizza took a little detective work. Frozen pizzas do not arrive fully cooked; the cheese melts and the dough completes baking in your oven. A frozen pizza needs to be heated at a high temperature to ensure that liquid from warming the cheese and sauce doesn't make the dough overly soggy upon cooking. It stands to reason, then, that a thawed pizza would need to be cooked at the highest temperature possible to stave off the effects of the ingredients releasing moisture in the oven. A bonus helpful hint: Use a pre-heated pizza stone if taking this route. If cooking a defrosted pizza turns it into mush, at least it won't fall through the slats of the oven rack and cause a big mess.

The pizza cooked from frozen looked noticeably golden. We took it out of the oven after about 18 minutes, as the cheese on top of the crust had blackened. The crust itself was still chewy, and while the crust did rise as advertised, it was too bland. The pepperoni crisped pleasingly. Oil from the cooked pepperoni infused the cheese, to where it was all one could really taste in the slice. This is truly the Ultimate Pepperoni.

While we cooked the frozen pizza as directed on the box, we let the second pizza defrost on the counter for 30 minutes then cooked it on a preheated baking stone in the oven at 550 degrees Fahrenheit. At this high temperature, we heated it for 10 minutes total.

We were surprised to discover that we preferred the defrosted DiGiorno pizza. While the cheese on the crust still blackened, the crust itself browned appealingly, appeared to rise a bit higher, and had a better consistency. One more minute in the oven may have fully melted the cheese, but it had more pull versus that of the frozen pizza. And the pepperoni didn't crisp as much, so it didn't leech its flavor across the pizza; the sauce and cheese flavors came forward, making a more composed bite. Give yourself the time to defrost your frozen pizza. While this adds prep time, you'll make up part of it by reducing the cooking time in half, so it's still a quick, pleasing meal.