We used to love the Tandoor Chef line of frozen food. We say “used to” because it doesn’t exist anymore — Tandoor Chef became Deep Indian Kitchen. You can argue that Tandoor Chef still exists, just with a different name, we suppose, so perhaps it’s more accurate to say that our love for Tandoor Chef has not died, but it has been transferred over to the new line at Deep Indian Kitchen.
Anyway…
We’re digging deep into the Deep line today, as we’re checking out the Deep Indian Kitchen Jalapeño Naan Pizza (which is a rebranded version of the Tandoor Chef product of the same name). You ready to go deep?
Before we get into the nitty gritty, we should address the elephant in the room. Yeah, the box in our photographs looks a bit beat up. So what happened?
We’ve been getting a majority of our groceries delivered ever since the pandemic lockdowns started. When we shop for things in-store, we tend to grab the nicest looking box so we can make sure we get a good photo. If a box is all smashed up, we’ll pass it up and reach for the nicer-looking box behind it.
With this specific item, however, no matter how many times we re-ordered it, the box arrived looking like it had been tossed around. We think there might have been a problem with the freezer and an entire batch of these pizzas got thawed and refrozen. The one we photographed for this review was the nicest one we were able to get. At least this means we got to eat this pizza several times!
So that’s that. Now let’s chow down. Normally we’d talk about the cooking instructions here, but this review is already getting really long, so you can find all that information in the package scans at the bottom of this review.
The pizza looks kind of dry in the image above. In fact, when we pulled this out of the oven, we were preparing to talk about how dry it is. But then we bit into it and found it to be not dry at all. Sure, the outside is a bit crispy, but this is still a lovely not-too-dry pizza.
This pizza’s standout feature is the naan bread crust. Deep Indian Kitchen knows this; they put the word Naan in the title of this product. This crust has a lovely home-baked flavor to it. It’s crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, which is a great consistency for this particular pizza.
On top of the naan bread, you’ve got a pretty high-quality tomato sauce (we have a New York-style pizza-by-the-slice shop just down the road from our office, and this sauce reminds us of theirs). There’s a little bit of cheese (not nearly enough) and some onions and jalapeños. The onions enhance the flavor of the sauce, while the jalapeños add a bit of spice. No, this isn’t super spicy, but it does have some kick to it. Considering the jalapeño portion is scant, we were surprised at how much of the spiciness lingers after you take a bite. It’s good stuff.
If you look at the box and see that this has 250 calories, you might want to look again before you get too excited about that number. The box considers half the pizza to be a serving, meaning the whole pizza has 500 calories (as well as 1,120 mg of sodium). We do think that you’ll eat the whole pizza and not just half of it — this isn’t much bigger than a single-serve pizza you’d get from, say, DiGiorno.
The Deep Indian Kitchen Jalapeño Naan Pizza is really tasty, and it’s even a bit spicier than we expected. The naan bread crust is the highlight, but the rest of the pizza is no joke. We just wish we could find a box that wasn’t all smashed up! (A little more cheese couldn’t hurt either.)
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen pizza, check out our package scans below.
