We’ve tasted a lot of Trader Joe’s pizzas, from the BBQ Chicken Pizza (which we didn’t care for) to the Roasted Garlic & Pesto Pizza with Deep Fried Crust (which we thought was fantastic). We’ve even dug into the Maître Pierre flatbreads, which are maybe not technically pizzas but we think of them as pizzas nonetheless.
Yet, in all of our frenzied pizza feeding, we haven’t ever tried the simplest of simple, the Trader Joe’s Organic 3 Cheese Pizza. This is a simple pizza that doesn’t really do anything to stand out among the crowd, so we kept passing it by whenever we stopped into a TJ’s store.
This ends today, folks, as today it’s finally time to dig into the Trader Joe’s Organic 3 Cheese Pizza.
Weirdly, this pizza actually comes precooked. Instead of seeing the shredded mozzarella on top of the pizza when you open it up, you’ll see already-melted-then-refrozen cheese on this. So if you want to microwave it, you actually can. We, however, went for the oven on this. It doesn’t even take that long. (If you want to read the instructions, check out our package scans at the bottom of this review.)
This is not a complex pizza by any means. It’s just cheese and sauce on a hand-tossed crust.
Flavor-wise, this reminds us of pub pizza a lot more than we were expecting. The cheese has a little bit of a mushy quality to it (presumably due to this being reheated), and the sauce tastes strongly acidic. Neither of those is a dealbreaker, but we really didn’t expect this to taste more like a low-end pizza than a gourmet one.
Which makes it all the weirder that they used such a delectable, high-quality crust here. This stuff is absolutely fantastic. It has a powdery texture to it, and it’s soft in the middle with just a little bit of crispiness to the edges. It’s a little chewy, but we think this is the right amount of chewy for this type of crust — we don’t mean this as a complaint. The crust is truly where the pizza starts showing its gourmet aspirations.
This pizza isn’t very big. We split ours between two reviewers, and both felt like it seemed more like a snack than a full meal. We think it’s safe to say that one very ambitious person could polish this off in a sitting. The box, however, thinks that there are three servings here. If you eat 1/3 of this pizza, you’re looking at 270 calories and 680 mg of sodium. If you scarf down the whole thing at once, though, you’re up to 820 calories and 2,060 mg of sodium.
The Trader Joe’s Organic 3 Cheese Pizza is a weird combination that takes some pub-style ingredients and puts them onto a really high-quality crust. The result is actually really good, though with the caveat that it’s good for a pub-style pizza rather than a gourmet one. Still, we actually liked this quite a lot, and we can see ourselves using this most basic of pizzas as a base for adding things like mushrooms and green peppers to the next time we cook one.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen pizza, check out our package scans below.
