Trader Joe’s Pizza 4 Formaggi Handmade Four Cheese Pizza Review

Trader Joe's Pizza 4 Formaggi Handmade Four Cheese Pizza

We love frozen pizza here at Freezer Meal Frenzy. How could we not? So it’s always a joy to pick up one we’ve never tried before. Today, we’re quite excited about checking out the Trader Joe’s Pizza 4 Formaggi Handmade Four Cheese Pizza, which is something we haven’t eaten before. It certainly does look delicious.

We should point out that we can’t verify with 100% certainty that this pizza is actually handmade, as the title suggests, but we can confirm that there are pictures of people hand-making pizzas on the back of the box.

Trader Joe's Pizza 4 Formaggi Handmade Four Cheese Pizza

So if you’re worried about this pizza being made in a factory full of handless robots, you can rest a little easier to know that Trader Joe’s at least showed enough effort to photograph people making pizzas. And those people have hands.

Anyway, we’re getting off on a bit of a tangent. Back to the pizza.

The box for this pizza actually gives microwave instructions, but we’re a bit nervous about how that would turn out. So we used the oven instructions. Simply preheat the oven to 425 degrees fahrenheit, then set the pizza directly on the oven rack for about seven or eight minutes (add an extra minute if you want crispier crust). It’s not as fast as the microwave, but it’s not an unreasonably cook time by any means.

Trader Joe's Pizza 4 Formaggi Handmade Four Cheese Pizza

This pizza comes out looking absolutely amazing. It’s almost a shame to have to eat this. Almost. Any hesitation you have about ruining the aesthetic of a perfect-looking pizza will vanish the second one of these slices hits your tastebuds. This is some incredibly great-tasting pizza.

First off, the crust has that woodfired feel. It’s crispy around the edges, but fairly soft everywhere else. We did think this was a little doughy directly beneath the sauce, but we certainly didn’t think that does anything to ruin the quality of this amazing pizza.

If you’ve ever had a neapolitan-style pizza, then the flavor of this pizza should be especially familiar. One of the ways that neapolitan pizza gets that flavor is by using tomatoes from a very specific region (the volcanic plains south of Mount Vesuvius, if this wikipedia article is accurate). This might be hard to believe, but the Freezer Meal Frenzy staff can’t determine the precise location of origin of a tomato based on flavor alone, so we can’t guarantee that these tomatoes come from the proper volcanic fields. What we can say, however, is that this Trader Joe’s pizza uses a sauce that tastes very much like that of the neapolitan pizza we’ve had.

Then there’s the cheese. This blend contains edam, asiago, pecorino, and grana padano. Wait, that’s not the mozzarella we’re familiar with! The pecorino and grana padano is listed as DOP. We weren’t sure what that means, so we looked it up. According to this article by Gourmet Foodstore, DOP stands for “Denominazione di Origine Protetta.” The English translation is: “Protected Designation of Origin.” All of that to say that this is a very impressive cheese blend. We could have probably just skipped right to the part where we tell you it tastes very good, but we tend to be curious eaters here at Freezer Meal Frenzy.

Trader Joe's Pizza 4 Formaggi Handmade Four Cheese Pizza

Trader Joe’s recommends that when you’re done cooking the pizza, you should drizzle some olive oil on top and then sprinkle with some fresh-ground black pepper. While that sounds amazing, we didn’t have any black pepper on hand so we skipped that step. The pizza still tastes wonderful without those additional touches.

The box claims this pizza contains three servings. We’ve said this before, but we’re perpetually frustrated that the makers of frozen pizzas (whether they have hands or not) don’t just consider a pizza to be two servings. That’s how we typically eat these things, after all, and we find it hard to believe that it’s more common to share a pizza three ways than two.

So once again, we’re forced to do some math here. One serving contains 310 calories (80 from fat) and 870 mg of sodium. That means a full pizza has 930 calories (240 from fat) and 2,610 mg of sodium, while a half pizza has 465 calories (120 from fat) and 1,305 mg of sodium.

Trader Joe’s Pizza 4 Formaggi Handmade Four Cheese Pizza is a truly wonderful pizza. We definitely recommend cooking this in the oven instead of the microwave, because if you’re going to buy a pizza this fancy, you might as well go all the way.

If you want to learn more about the nutrition content or ingredients in this Trader Joe’s cheese pizza, check out our package scans below.

Trader Joe's Pizza 4 Formaggi Handmade Four Cheese Pizza
Trader Joe's Pizza 4 Formaggi Handmade Four Cheese Pizza
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