Archer Farms is a Target sub-brand. As such, it might come as a surprise that the Archer Farms frozen pizza selection is pretty robust. For example, they have a Greek-Inspired Spinach & Feta Cheese Traditional Crust Pizza that’s quite lovely, and the Peach & Balsamic Thin Crust Pizza is an odd-but-loveable meal.
But sometimes, all you want is a plain and simple pie that doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary. Well, Target’s freezer aisle has you covered with the Archer Farms Four Cheese Wood-Fired Crust Pizza.
Now, while many of the other Archer Farms pizzas we’ve tried have pretty positive customer reviews, this one didn’t do so well among Target shoppers. At the time of this writing, this pizza has a customer rating of two out of five stars, with complaints that it is “too salty” and “tastes terrible.” Well, dear readers, we’re not going to be deterred by bad customer reviews. Whether good or bad, we must dive into this pizza so we can give our honest opinion.
There’s not a whole lot to this pizza — it’s just a pretty basic affair with tomato sauce and cheese on a pizza crust.
So let’s start with the cheese. The cheese portion here is pretty generous, especially when compared with some of the other frozen pizzas we’ve tasted in the past. It’s a blend of four cheeses, which the marketing copy on the box refers to as “mozzarella, smoked Gouda and 2 Italian varieties.” If you’re really curious about those other two cheeses, they’re pecorino romano and parmigiano reggiano. The flavor combo is kind of strange, though, with a slightly platicy fake-smoke taste to it. We found that a little off-putting.
The sauce is pretty scant. If you peel back the cheese, you’ll reveal patches of the pizza where there isn’t any sauce at all. More sauce could have mitigated the odd flavor of the cheese, so it’s strange that Archer Farms decided to be so stingy here.
The wood-fired crust is actually the best part of this pizza. It’s fairly thick and it has a really great consistency, with a crispy outer shell and a soft, warm middle. It also has that lovely wood-smoked doughy flavor. It’s great!
The nutrition info on the package claims that a quarter of a pizza is a serving. That’s actually pretty reasonable, as so many of the other pizzas we review have strange portion sizes, like 1/5 of a pizza or 1/3 of a pizza. At least the 1/4 fraction makes it easy to slice this thing into proper-sized portions.
If you stick o the recommended serving size, you’ll be tossing 350 calories and 570 mg of sodium into your belly. While that sounds pretty reasonable, we think that half a pizza is going to be a more common serving size. If you split this two ways, like we did, you’re going to have to take the above numbers and double them. This pizza isn’t looking quite as sexy now, is it?
The Archer Farms Four Cheese Wood-Fired Crust Pizza is kind of odd-tasting for a frozen pizza. It tastes a bit like a generic pizza that’s trying really hard to be a fancy one, so it just ends up being kind of disappointing all around. While the customer rating of two stars seems a little harsh, this is certainly not one of the better frozen pizzas in the Archer Farms lineup.
To learn more about the nutritional content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Archer Farms frozen pizza, check out our package scans below.
