What You Should Look For In A Top Notch Frozen Pizza According To A Pro

It's always good to keep a frozen pizza on hand. It's a good backup for nights that you just don't feel like cooking, don't want to leave the house, and don't have a DoorDash budget. But while Chowhound has ranked 16 popular store-bought frozen pizza brands to see which is the best, it never hurts to get a second opinion from an industry expert — in this case, Nicole Bean, who owns and operates two Houston-based pizzerias with her family called Pizaro's Pizza Napoletana. Being a pizza professional, Bean isn't necessarily a huge fan of frozen pizza. However, she has some helpful advice for those of us who like to keep it in our freezers.

When looking for the best frozen pizza, start by checking the list of ingredients to make sure the items listed are fresh and recognizable. "If you don't know what something is, it's less likely they're fresh ingredients," says Bean. "Additionally, if the ingredient list is longer than the amount of toppings on your pizza, you may be lowering the quality of nutritional value." Bean doesn't buy frozen pizza herself; however, "if I had to choose one, Central Market offers a simple list of ingredients on its label."

We took a closer look at the ingredients list for a Central Market Bianca Basil frozen pizza. It includes self-explanatory (and tasty-sounding) ingredients like wheat flour, mozzarella cream cheese, basil, toasted hazelnuts, and lemon peel. Even Chowhound's favorite pizza on the ranked list, while tasty, would fail Bean's "simple ingredients" test.

Along the lines of keeping your frozen pizza's ingredient list as short as possible, Nicole Bean recommends reaching for a plainer pie and personalizing it from there. "If I wanted to enhance my frozen pizza," she says, "I would find the most simplistic pizza such as a cheese or margherita, and then I would grab fresh produce or salami from the deli and add those pre- or post-bake (depending on the topping)." Just make sure you avoid making common pizza topping mistakes like overloading a thin-crust pizza or muting more delicate flavors with something overpowering (and don't overlook unexpected topping options like smoked salmon or squash).

Now, Bean's favorite frozen pizza brand, Central Market, may be difficult to find. Central Market itself is a smaller chain limited to the state of Texas; while you may also be able to find it at HEB, which has a few hundred locations, that grocery store is still primarily a Texas institution. If you do live in Texas, a slightly cheaper HEB option is Midtown Pizza, whose ingredients list resembles Central Market's. Looking back at Chowhound's ranked list of more widely available brands, the top-rated pizza with the cleanest ingredient list seems to be the one that clinched the bronze, Urban Pie. The list was lengthy, but the majority of those ingredients were pretty straightforward and didn't just sound like a complicated chemical construction. Amy's Pizza, which was ranked seventh, would also be a decent choice.