Microwave pizza isn’t a difficult meal to find. If you just want a plain cheese pizza or a classic three-meat pie, you’re pretty much guaranteed to find something at your favorite grocery store. Lean Cuisine offers these things, sure, but they’ve also gotten a little experimental with the formula, creating the French Bread Pepperoni Pizza.
We weren’t sure what to expect from this one. On the box, it almost looks like a triangular slice of pizza with a piece of garlic cheese bread on the side. What this dish actually contains, though, is what we’d be tempted to call a hoagie.
This meal’s box folds into a crisping tray, so you can stuff the whole thing into the microwave and simply heat for two and a half minutes. The box comes apart easily and is a cinch to fold, unlike some of the other crisping trays we’ve dealt with. We should also point out that the pepperoni comes off really easily while it’s still frozen, so if you just want a cheese pizza version of this, you can remove the pepperoni before cooking the hoagie.
Two and a half minutes is a pretty reasonable cook time, and it comes out of the microwave with a delicious scent. Your whole kitchen will be filled with the smell of garlic and tomato sauce.
The crisping tray does what it can, and the very bottom of this hoagie comes out nice and crispy. The rest of it, though, has a strange, soft texture that’s maybe not the worst thing in the world, but we think this one might turn out better in a traditional oven.
The pepperoni is sliced surprisingly thick, so it offers a lot of flavor. Plus, this thing is absolutely loaded with Lean Cusine’s tomato paste, which tastes great. We could have used a bit more cheese, but the whole thing is flavorful enough that it’s hard to complain.
While Lean Cuisine’s French Bread Pepperoni Pizza is neither a perfect hoagie nor a perfect pizza, it’s a nice blend of the two and it’s fun to eat.
If you want to know more about the nutrition content and ingredients found in this frozen food, check out our package scans below.
