If you spend a lot of time shopping at Target, then you’re probably familiar with the Archer Farms brand. This is a Target-exclusive brand that makes all sorts of food products, including frozen foods. We’ve been checking out some of their offerings lately, and today we’re trying the Archer Farms Pepperoni Self-Rising Crust Pizza.
This isn’t the first Archer Farms frozen pizza we’ve reviewed. Not long ago, we tasted their Hawaiian-Style Pizza, which we liked quite a bit though it was a little on the sweet side. So how does the pepperoni pizza stack up against that one? Let’s dig in and find out.
First, of course, we have to cook the thing. This takes about 20 minutes to cook in the oven, plus preheat time. Sorry, microwave superfans, but you won’t be nuking this pizza. (If you want to see the full cooking instructions, check out our package scans at the bottom of this article.)
The first thing we noticed when we pulled this out of the oven is that at first glance, it is almost indistinguishable from a DiGiorno rising crust pizza. You’d almost swear that this was just the same thing in a different box.
However, there are noticeable differences in flavor. The main difference is that the sauce tastes nothing like DiGiorno’s — Archer Farms uses a much sweeter tomato sauce. While we found that to be a little much when paired with pineapple and a sweet Canadian bacon, it’s actually kind of lovely when contrasted against pepperoni.
The crust is a bit more like DiGiorno’s crust, though we find it to be slightly lower in quality. It’s not a huge difference, but it is noticeable to anyone who’s eaten a lot of DiGiorno rising crust pizza. It also has just a little bit of sweetness that’s absent in DiGiorno pizza crust, but it’s not nearly as obvious as the sweetness of the sauce.
Our pepperoni was unevenly spread across the pizza. We could have redistributed it ourselves, of course, but part of the utility of frozen food is that it typically requires very little effort to make. The pepperoni tastes great, though. Ours ended up soft, even though we cooked the pizza for a few extra minutes, so this probably won’t appeal to fans of crispier pepperoni. We tend to like our pepperoni on the softer side, so this is perfect for us.
We’ve said this before, but we think it’s a little weird to count one pizza as six servings. We think it’s probably pretty common to split a pizza between two people (which is typically how we eat these things in the Freezer Meal Frenzy office). However, if you do that, the justifiable 350 calories and 720 mg of sodium become the much more devastating 1,050 calories and 2,160 mg of sodium. This is definitely not something that should become a regular part of anyone’s diet.
The Archer Farms Pepperoni Self-Rising Crust Pizza is a lovely frozen pizza that looks like a DiGiorno brand pie but tastes entirely different. Though this level of sweetness doesn’t work for every pizza, we found it to be quite appealing here. So if you’re looking for a cheap frozen pizza on a budget, you might want to give Archer Farms a try.
To learn more about the cooking instructions, ingredients, or nutritional content for this frozen pizza, check out our package scans below.
