5. Totino’s pizza rolls. I mean, c’mon. 90 seconds in the microwave and you are in artificial food heaven. Can I get someone to co-sign, please? And the best part is, each briquet is a pillow of mystery. When you bite the crust it is literal Russian roulette. Will the insides be scalding hot and boil your gums, tongue and roof of your mouth? Or will it still be frozen and crack your molars? Sometimes a Totino’s pizza roll hits the unicorn of microwave outcomes: still frozen and yet also scalding in the same roll. For suspense nothing tops Totino’s.
4. Stouffer’s French bread pizza. Yet another old school staple completely unchanged from its Eighties heyday. And like Totino’s impossible to cook evenly—even though the two slices sit in the same oven on the same rack at the same temperature. If memory serves the prescribed cooking time of approximately 40 minutes at 375 is never enough. If you want a properly cooked Stouffer’s French bread pizza you needed to start it last Tuesday and still cross your fingers. But when done right, at the right time of night, after 13 Jager bombs, nothing is better.
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3. Pizza Quick Sauce. On this one I am openly cheating on my own headline. There’s nothing frozen here but I can’t talk about Totino’s and Stouffers without mentioning this red liquid in a jar that would be Ragu spaghetti sauce if it didn’t have that unmistakable pizza taste. When I was roughly 10-12 years old I learned how to use our toaster oven. It was like handing Picasso a paint brush and saying, get after it Pablo. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t put in the toaster oven. And when Pizza Quick Sauce came out, with a big ad campaign and catchy TV jingle, I was all in. My recipe: toast some Wonder bread in the regular toaster, spread some Pizza Quick on the resulting toast, dump about half a can of Kraft grated parmesan onto the sauce, and then brown under the toaster oven broiler function. I basically lived on this for an entire year.
2. Home Run Inn frozen pizza. The best frozen pizza I had ever had (until we get to #1). This brand, which is actually a Chicago-based chain of pizzerias that started selling their pies in the freezer case, works especially well if you happen to have a table top Presto rotating pizza maker, which I do. Full of bold flavor but with a crust you would never guess had ever been frozen, Home Run Inn is a…grand slam.
And at #1 on the list, Motor City Pizza Company. This is Detroit style-pizza that tastes like it just came out of the oven at Buddy’s and not your General Electric oven at home from 1976. You can get pepperoni, supreme, three-meat, ultimate meat or four-cheese. Nothing in the frozen pizza aisle, not even Home Run Inn, can touch this pie. Sales took off after Costco started stocking this locally made New Boston product. Now you can find it in multiple places—if you can find it in stock. And just for fun, you don’t get just one—they box them two to a package. Full disclosure: I raved about this pizza on television after I had it the first time and all of a sudden my phone lit up. Why, I wondered, was my neighbor Peter whose son plays with my daughter calling me? Turns out it’s his product! His job is Authentic Motor City Pizza Co. Small world. But at least he knows I tried it and loved it before I knew he was involved.
So there you have it. Five pizza items you need in your life, pronto. Pair with Riuniti Lambrusco and your night is gonna be a banger. Oh, and get that rotating pizza oven. It’s mesmerizing.
Watch Jason Carr Live, weekdays from 8 a.m. to 9:45 a.m., streaming live on Local 4+ and ClickOnDetroit.