Cheap calories. That’s one way to describe the Totino’s Party Pizza. While this is actually quite true, that description ignores the real appeal of these budget-priced pizzas. No, they actually taste kind of good. Not in a gourmet, high-quality way, but in that junk-food, guilty-pleasure way. So these pizzas are for two groups of people: those who need super-cheap calories, and those who just want to munch on some junk food.
So we’re going into our review of the Totino’s Hamburger Party Pizza with that very much in mind. No, we’re not expecting the ever-craveable glory of a Lotzza Motzza pizza or anything like that; we’re expecting something that kind of tastes like what you would have been served in an elementary school cafeteria back in the 1980s.
Cooking one of these is a pretty simple task; just preheat your oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit, then pop the pizza in for 15 minutes or so. Ours actually didn’t even need that much time, as you can see it got super brown around the edges after just 15 minutes. We think we could have probably cut that down to maybe 13, but at the same time, the cheese didn’t really melt all the way either. (If you want to read the full cooking instructions for this frozen pizza, check out the package scans at the bottom of this review.)
Totino’s pizza crust has a really odd consistency that we’d hesitate to call either soft or crispy — no, we’d refer to this as crackly. It never really develops a true crisp, but it crackles when you bite into it. It also doesn’t taste bad enough to ruin the pizza, but it’s definitely not our preferred pizza crust.
Another hallmark of a Totino’s pizza is that there’s never really an adequate amount of any topping. The sauce portion is skimpy, the cheese portion is scant, and whatever meats and veggies are on top are scattered and thinly spread. That said, this pizza actually had more cheese than we were expecting. Typically, we expect a Totino’s pizza to have that issue where you can see the sauce through the patches of cheese, but this one didn’t have that issue.
The sauce is… well, it’s a thing. This sauce kind of soaks into the crust while the pizza cooks, so it’s really hard to separate the sauce from the crust. It tastes alright, we suppose, and it’s on the sweeter end of the sauce spectrum, which we dig.
So what’s the difference between the hamburger pizza and the sausage pizza? Well, we’re actually not sure. We’re guessing there’s a slight difference in the beef recipe — perhaps less spices in this one — though it’s really hard to tell because the meat portion is so small here. We think that, for all intents and purposes, there’s very little discernable difference between Totino’s sausage and hamburger flavors, except for the fact that the hamburger pizza definitely has less meat than the sausage one.
Remember how we talked about cheap calories in the opening paragraph of this review? Well, that’s really true here, as this little pizza contains 720 calories (as well as 1,420 mg of sodium). Those numbers are really, really high for something that’s easily eatable in a single sitting.
The Totino’s Hamburger Party Pizza is neither a hamburger or a party. Heck, it’s barely even a pizza. However, if you have a super limited budget, one of these pizzas will give you a whole mess of calories for a low, low price. At the time of this writing, Totino’s pizzas are selling at our local Target for $1.99, and we think that the value for the price is pretty fair here (that’s actually up from the $1.39 these cost the last time we price checked them, but inflation’s been wild this year). No, this pizza won’t blow your mind, but it’s decent enough for two bucks.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen pizza, check out our package scans below.
