Home Cooking: Pizza Tips and Tricks

How to Improve on Frozen Pizza with Minimal Cost and Effort

Pizza. We know it. We love it. In fact, Americans eat 100 acres of it every day. Yet cooking frozen pizza at home usually results in food that is probably best described as mediocre.I'm here to help you with that. By the time you're done reading this you'll be able prepare a great tasting pizza at a fraction of the cost of having it delivered. Home cooking to the rescue!

Now, I consider myself a pizza connoisseur- in fact, the food that is produced by most of the large pizza chains is disgusting to me. I worked for several years cooking high quality pizza at a very popular family owned italian restaurant, and my tastes are very discriminating. I have also spent several years cooking frozen pizza at home, perfecting the techniques that I'm about to share with you.

The most important step is choosing the right frozen pizza to use as your base. Rising crust pizzas are recommended because they tend to require longer cooking times. This means that there will be plenty of time for your fresh veggies to become fully cooked.

I personally prefer Safeway's Verdi pizza, in either the Chicken Parmesan or Pepperoni variety. Try to avoid frozen pizzas that already have vegetables on them because they just don't taste right.

Now that you've got your pizza, you're probably going to want to add some veggies to it. The fastest, easiest and most cost effective combination of toppings are garlic and onions, so I'm going to concentrate on these two.

A good rule of thumb when adding garlic is to start on the outside- putting clumps of garlic about 1/2 inch in from the edge, or where the cheese meets the crust of the pizza, then work your way to the inside in a circular motion. Also, it's easier to use chopped garlic that comes in a jar than to dice your own. Dig a spoonful of garlic out of the jar and use your fingers to distribute the garlic evenly around the pizza. Repeat as necessary. Diced garlic tends to stay in small clumps, which is acceptable.