Here at Freezer Meal Frenzy, we’ve been reviewing frozen food for about five years now. In all that time, we’ve never reviewed a Red Baron product. What? How on earth does something like that even happen? Red Baron is a staple of freezer aisles around the nation! A staple!
We’re not sure how we passed on this brand for so long, but that’s definitely something we’re going to correct today.
Of course, we’re not starting with their pizza (though we do plan on getting to that eventually). Instead, we’re checking out the Red Baron Pepperoni Pizza Melt, which is more like a grilled cheese sandwich than a pizza.
Believe it or not, the recommended cooking instructions say to heat this in the microwave. It does come with a crisping tray to mitigate some of that microwave sogginess, but we’ve had mixed experiences with this sort of thing in the past. No matter how good your crisping tray is, it never seems to get your bread toasted as well as a toaster oven or conventional oven.
That said, we decided to give the microwave a shot anyway. If you want to read the exact cooking instructions, you can check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.
As we expected, the bread doesn’t turn out perfectly. It’s a bit chewy and a little soggy, which is an unfortunate result of microwave convenience. If you want to minimize this, put the sandwich together, then let it cool for a minute on one side, then flip it over to let it cool on the other. This “airs out” both sides of the sandwich so that it’s not damp on one side.
The flavor of the bread is pretty alright, though. It has a little bit of that sourdough flavor, which is nice.
Of course, it’s what’s inside that matters. On that front, you’ve got gooey mozzarella cheese, some sauce, and a batch of pepperoni. The pepperoni is pretty good. We think this is comparable to DiGiorno’s pepperoni, though this one might be just a tad bit richer. It works really well on this particular sandwich, we think.
The sauce portion isn’t huge, but it adds just a touch of that pizza-sauce flavor to bring this together. And then there’s the cheese, which is fine. We would have loved to see more of it, of course, but what’s here does the job it set out to do (which is giving this a bit of stretchiness, as well as delivering that classic mozzarella flavor).
This is certainly not made for dieters. If you eat the whole sandwich (you probably will, because it’s not very big), you’re taking in 440 calories and 920 mg of sodium. Neither of those numbers is extreme, but they’re both well outside the range of a diet-friendly frozen meal.
The Red Baron Pepperoni Pizza Melt is a decent attempt at combining pizza with a grilled cheese sandwich. We love the concept, and we appreciate the execution, but we think that the microwave will never be ideal for this type of project, no matter how far crisping-tray technology advances.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen pizza melt, check out our package scans below.
