Some people recoil at the idea of ranch dressing on pizza. We at Freezer Meal Frenzy, however, are true midwesterners, so we welcome this unusual combo with open arms. And so, when we spotted the Archer Farms Chicken Bacon Ranch Pizza at our local Target, we knew we had to give this pie a try.
Now, this has a pretty standard cooking process for a frozen pizza. Simply preheat your oven and pop it in. None of this should surprise anyone who’s ever cooked a frozen pizza. (To see the full cooking instructions, check out our package scans at the bottom of this article.)
According to the box, there are all sorts of ways you can dress this up. Some of the suggestions include using even more ranch dressing as a dipping sauce, adding a barbeque sauce, or even adding bleu cheese and avocado. While all of these sounds like they’d be pretty tasty, we decided to try just the pizza that comes in the box without doctoring it up at all.
Due to the ranch dressing, this pizza comes out a little bit weird. The top is a bit soupier than you’d expect a pizza to be, which causes toppings to slide around when you pick up a slice. There’s also very little cheese on top, and a slightly more generous portion of cheese could have maybe solved this problem.
The ranch, then, is the focal point of the flavor for this entire pizza. It’s fine, but it’s nothing special — and keep in mind this comes from ranch enthusiasts. So this pizza really needs something to stand on other than just its ranch dressing portion, and it doesn’t really have that.
There are tiny chunks of chicken on this pizza, but their presence is scant. It’s pale and doesn’t have a ton of flavor, which means it’s really just something solid to slide around in the ranch dressing when you try to pick up a slice.
Plus, all of our bacon congregated to one side of the pizza. We tried to fix that before we stuck this pizza in the oven, but much of that bacon was frozen into the sauce and wouldn’t budge. This led to a pizza where only a couple slices had a majority of the bacon, while the rest of the pizza was almost barren of that delicious oinker meat.
The crust, however, is as tasty as ever. Archer Farms uses a crust that’s very similar to DiGiorno’s, though the Archer Farm version has just a little bit of sweetness to it. This isn’t a good choice for every pizza — it doesn’t suit an overly sweet Hawaiian pizza very well — but it works really well for this one.
We have to admit that this pizza is not as bad as it sounds after we spent several paragraphs nitpicking its flaws. We liked it alright, but it does feel a little incomplete. We acknowledge that this is partially our fault, as we could have taken the advice of the box and dressed this up a little bit. However, we think that frozen pizzas should simply be take-and-bake, not take-and-add-a-bunch-of-stuff-and-then-bake.
According to the box, this pizza contains six servings. It’s pretty awkward to split a pizza into sixths, and we think half a pizza is a much more realistic portion size for a hungry adult (a slightly-hungry adult might be more comfortable with 3/8 of a pizza.) That means this sucker is loaded up with calories. If you eat the recommended serving size (which is less than a slice and a half if you cut this into eighths like a normal person), you’ll be consuming 320 calories (100 from fat) and 600 mg of sodium. If you eat half a pizza, you’ll have to multiply that by three. That means a half pizza contains 960 calories (300 from fat) and 1,800 mg of sodium. That is enough to make dieters run away screaming.
The Archer Farms Chicken Bacon Ranch Self-Rising Crust Pizza is good but not great. As the box proclaims, you can doctor this up a bit if you want to make it more exciting, but what comes in the package feels like it’s missing something. This isn’t a terrible problem, as the pizza is still pretty decent; it just makes us hesitant to recommend this over one of Archer Farms’ better pizzas, such as the Peach & Balsamic Thin Crust Pizza.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Archer Farms frozen pizza, check out our package scans below.
