They never come out anywhere near as good as a freshly made pizza at a pizzeria when I follow the box directions. I imagine some of that is a result of freezing the pizza, but I think the directions might be the bigger factor. So my plan is to try emulating the conditions of a proper pizza oven to the best of my ability by:
- Thawing the pizza out before cooking
- Preheating the oven to its hottest setting (500f) with a metal baking sheet inside it
- Putting the pizza directly onto the hot sheet and closely monitoring until it looks done
This is still a very far cry from a pizza stone and an actual pizza oven, but I’m hoping it’ll at least be somewhat closer to the real thing. Am I going in the right direction with this / do you have any better ideas?
In my experience those pizzas are designed to be cooked from frozen on a bare rack. The dough is almost fully cooked already, so thawing probably won’t make the dough less dense. Cooking it on a sheet will probably make the bottom less crispy.
A lot of stores sell fresh premade pizza dough, but even a frozen dough ball makes much better pizza. If you really are pressed for time you can buy premade sauce, preshredded pizza cheese mix. Throw it together on a piece of parchment and cook that on your heavy baking sheet.
Shit, I never noticed that before because the dough is still white and it’s hard to determine the texture while frozen. That’s probably the killer now that you mention it. I already have the pizza, so I’m still going to try it this way, but next time I’ll keep on eye out for the frozen, uncooked dough.
EDIT: After thawing it out, it looks like my pizza actually did have raw dough. It had risen a bit before I even put it into the oven. It’s cooking now, will update later.