Frozen Fridays #10:
Candlelight Chicago Frozen Pizza
(Sold on Goldbelly)
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Up for todays review we have the frozen pizzas from “Candlelight Chicago” pizzeria. These are not store bought, but are sold via “Goldbelly”.
The owner or someone in charge emailed me and invited me to go out to try their pizza at their pizzeria but given they are about an hour away and it’s the wonderful Chicago winter weather currently, I had to politely decline for now. To my surprise they then offered to ship me their frozen pizzas so I can give those a try.
Out the package it looked great but that’s to be expected from these restaurant fresh made pizzas that are shipped to customers. Crust looks like it was parbaked so I wasn’t sure what to expect at the end. In today’s review we have 2 different pizzas. One with sausage and the other pepperoni.
First and foremost, I want to say I’m definitely thankful for them sending me these pizzas free of charge, but I still have all intention of keeping this 100% honest otherwise every free pizza would be a 10 and this page / journey would become a bit useless. Given these pizzas cost just as much as a fresh one, there definitely cannot be any generic “frozen pizza” taste or well.. that just wouldn’t make much sense and would make for quite the poor offering.
First one up was the sausage and the fresh, uncooked sausage was a nice touch. sadly it resembled more of a frozen pizza than it did a fresh one but I held off on my judgement and still had high hopes.
Tried to cut it in squares to make it feel lore like a fresh pizza, but can you see I totally messed that up as I’ve never cut a pizza into squares myself before. Cutting in triangles is clearly a lot easier but I’ll surely get the right next time, lol.
The way to describe this pizza would be it tastes like a good pizza you reheated as leftovers. The sausage and sauce tasted great but the cheese and crust were very lacking. The crust was thin, but dense and crumbles to a million bits on every bite similar to how a graham cracker would. I’m not sure If this was a one off issue, but it definitely ruined the pizza for me.
For strictly taste, I’m going to go 6.4 for the sausage pizza. However, if I had factored in price as well, this would have been an even lower score as this pizza comes at a large premium vs other frozens.
Pepperoni:
A few days later i had the pepperoni frozen. The crust was definitely a one off problem on the sausage pizza as the pepperoni was not as graham cracker like, bur more proper thin. Still not anywhere near a fresh pizza crust taste, but a lot better. The sauce was definitely the star of the show and was delicious. However, on the pepperoni pizza it tasted more prominent that these pizzas are likely not made with the same ingredients as the ones in store or are processed in some way to hold better. If not, maybe they just don’t cook well after being frozen. The cheese especially had that signature processed / preserved taste that is on every store bought frozen. Based off the price of these, I gotta say I’m disappointed. Anything sold on Goldbelly or equivalent prices needs to be of way higher quality (and they usually are), otherwise it really makes no sense and you might as well get a regular less than 8 dollar grocery isle pizza. Even the pepperonis really lacked flavor. I’m sure their in restaurant pizzas taste a lot better but unfortunately these frozen versions just taste like..well, a frozen pizza. I initially had high hopes for these but unfortunately they seem to be more of a cash grab than they are a solid offering. I’m going 5.7 on the pepperoni.