Lean Cuisine has been shuffling products among their frozen food lines, and that creates the opportunity for the brand to rethink some of their recipes. It also gives us reviewers the opportunity to revisit some of these products and see how they’ve changed.
So today we’re delving deeper into the new Features line to revisit an old friend, the Lean Cuisine Pepperoni Pizza. Yes, we’ve reviewed this before, but now that it’s been moved into the Features line, we really want to try it again to see if anything (besides the box art) has changed.
Cooking this product is simple, though it does require some origami. Well, not origami, per se, but you do have to fold the box to make use of the attached crisping tray. We explained all this in our previous review, so we won’t go over it again, except to say that nothing’s really changed here.
In fact, we can say the same for this entire meal — not a lot has changed at all, aside from the box. Of course, the calorie count is just a tad bit lower, so Lean Cuisine must have tampered with the recipe just enough to round down instead of up when they listed the calorie count. We promise you, we didn’t notice anything substantially different here.
The crust is still thinner than you might expect, the pepperoni still has the same jerky-like toughness, and the cheese is still scarce. This time, however, it did seem like more of the cheese was on top of the pepperoni rather than underneath it. It’s a clever trick, but it’s not going to fool us into thinking there’s actually more cheese here.
We have to admit, though that we do kind of like the sauce here. It’s a generic tomato paste, but there’s just a hint of sweetness to it that really enhances the flavor of the crust. It’s not amazing, but we love it in that “guilty pleasure” sort of way.
Even though they managed to knock 10 calories of the reported total, Lean Cuisine is really abandoning the “Lean” part of their brand name with this item. This weighs in at 400 calories. It also has 860 mg of sodium, so this really isn’t one of those meals you can count on as a regular lunch. Eat this one with caution, folks.
The Lean Cuisine Pepperoni Pizza is still a pretty mediocre frozen pizza that doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from its competitors. If you really want a tasty pizza that can be nuked in a flash, we recommend the DiGiorno Stuffed Crust Personal Size Pepperoni Pizza over anything Lean Cuisine offers.
If you want to know more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this Lean Cuisine frozen pizza, check out our package scans below.
