With the Vegan Meatless Meat Eater’s Pizza, Trader Joe’s is attempting to make a vegan-friendly pizza for meat lovers. It does kind of seem like a contradiction in concept, doesn’t it? Not only do you not see “meat eater” and “vegan” in the same description, but pizzas are also known for being super cheesy, which our vegan friends are typically not cool with.
But if anyone can pull off this tall order, it’s the food geniuses at TJ’s. So we’re going to try this today and see what we think. You ready for this?
This pizza is so easy to cook that the cooking instructions hardly take up any space on the box (which you can verify by scrolling down to the bottom of this review and checking out those package scans). Basically, you need to preheat your oven to 425 degrees Fahrenheit, then cook it for 14 minutes.
As you probably noticed when looking at the image above, the cheese doesn’t really melt properly. Obviously, that’s because it’s not actual cheese — this is a “mozzarella-style cheese alternative,” according to the ingredients list. It’s made primarily from coconut oil and potato starch, which probably explains its lack of stretchy, melty, cheesy qualities.
Because of this, you might be tempted to overcook this. You’ll take a look after those 14 minutes are up and see a completely not-melted batch of cheese. Don’t make this mistake, folks, unless you want a super crispy pizza.
Let’s rank the meat from worst to best. First up is the pepperoni, which tastes like Play Doh and kind of has a similar consistency. This stuff if awful. The Italian sausage is halfway decent, though it does kind of have a grainy flavor to it. But the chorizo turns out pretty good. This is mostly because the spices cover up how fake this tastes otherwise, but we actually think it tastes pretty decent.
The crust is pretty basic but it does its job. As we mentioned earlier, it could get too crispy if you overcook it. The other problem is that with all this fake meat and fake cheese on top of it, the crust ends up with a weird consistency in the middle where its mushy and dense at the same time.
The sauce is s tomato puree with some spices thrown in. It’s nothing special, but again, it gets the job done.
The box recommends 1/3 of the pizza as a serving size, but this is a pretty small pizza. You could easily eat the whole thing in a sitting. If you do eat the recommended 1/3, though, you’ll be consuming 250 calories and 600 mg of sodium. If you eat the whole thing, you’ll be up to 750 calories and 1,790 mg of sodium.
The Trader Joe’s Vegan Meatless Meat Eater’s Pizza is definitely not made for meat-eaters. We admire the effort that TJ’s put into this, but we don’t think they quite nailed this one. Maybe vegans will disagree with us, but our meat-loving staffers found this to be a pale imitation of the real deal.
To learn more about the nutrition content, ingredients, or cooking instructions for this frozen pizza, check out our package scans below.
