We’ve tried our fair share of gluten-free frozen pizzas at this point, and it’s amazing how many different approaches there are. For example, Udi’s uses brown rice flour and tapioca flour for their crust, while Evol just uses a slab of chicken.
With the Life Cuisine Gluten Free Lifestyle Cauliflower Crust Pepperoni Pizza, Lean Cuisine takes yet another approach: using a cauliflower-based crust. Now, we did try out the three-cheese version of this pizza not too long ago, but today we’re finally digging into the pepperoni version.
The box will fold apart into a crisping tray for microwave use. Simply remove the pizza from its wrap, place it on the crisping tray, and pop that sucker into the microwave for three minutes and ten seconds. You can also heat this in the oven if you’d like, but we went with the microwave for this one (as we figured that will be the method that most people use to cook this).
Well, this one didn’t go the way we thought it would folks.
As you can see in the picture above, the entire pizza just melted into the box. Now, we admit that we scratched our heads over this when we first saw it, but it actually wasn’t as bad as it looks. We just used a spatula to scrape the pizza off the box and it ended up turning out alright (though we did mourn the loss of all the cheese that had integrated itself too completely into the cardboard to be salvaged — that was a pretty good amount of cheese).
This has a little bit of a cauliflower taste buried beneath it somewhere, but it mostly just tastes like a cheap pepperoni pizza. And we actually don’t mean that in a bad way at all — this is maybe a Totino’s quality pizza, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
The crust is also a bit mushy, despite the fact that we used (or attempted to use) the provided crisping tray. We cut this pizza into eighths and ate it with a fork, which seemed to work out pretty well.
The sauce is decent-tasting, there’s a halfway decent cheese portion, and the pepperoni is pretty good. We’d probably rather have a real pepperoni pizza, but this actually makes for a halfway decent replacement for those avoiding gluten. In fact, this cauliflower crust is certainly preferable to using sliced chicken as a crust.
One pizza contains 390 calories, so this really isn’t a low-cal meal. Then again, it’s a pizza, so we doubt you were expecting something lean here. In fact, if you compare this to some of the other pizzas we’ve enjoyed lately, it’s actually not that bad.
The Life Cuisine Gluten Free Lifestyle Cauliflower Crust Pepperoni Pizza has some issues, but it’s actually a pretty decent slice of pizza pie. While it’s not amazing, it makes a pretty decent replacement for the real stuff, which makes it pretty alright in our book.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this gluten free pizza, check out our package scans below.
