Make Frozen Cheese Pizza 10x Better With Leftover Rotisserie Chicken

Understanding how to spot a high-quality frozen pizza not only helps keep your freezer stocked with convenient dinner options, but it's also a key component to making pizza night both budget-friendly and delicious. This is especially true of cheese pizza, which is often less expensive than its toppings-laden counterparts. Plain pizza is also the perfect blank canvas for customizing with your own ingredients, including leftover rotisserie chicken.

Among the many genius ways to use up leftover rotisserie chicken, adding it to frozen pizza might be one of the cleverest and tastiest, especially if you're a big fan of Buffalo chicken or tangy barbecue chicken pizza. These specialty pies are expensive from pizzerias, but incredibly easy to replicate at home. All it takes is a light drizzle of your chosen sauce and a small handful of diced or shredded rotisserie chicken, added directly to the top of the frozen pizza, along with a final layer of complementary cheese. Blue cheese crumbles are perfect for Buffalo chicken pizza, while sharp yellow cheddar or pepper jack works well for barbecue.

This works because these toppings are fairly robust and can handle the high heat and full cooking time needed to bring your frozen pizza to bubbly, crispy perfection. The extra layer of cheese also helps keep the chicken tender, though you can squeeze on a little extra sauce after baking for extra flavor and moisture. You can also keep the chicken succulent by mixing the meat with your preferred sauce before adding it to the pie.

Adding rotisserie chicken to cheese pizza is one of the best budget-friendly frozen pizza hacks beyond spicy Buffalo or smoky barbecue because this combo works well with many flavors. For instance, if you're a big fan of Italian flavors, it's easy enough to make a chicken Caprese pizza with rotisserie chicken, dollops of your favorite store-bought pesto, and fresh mozzarella pearls or slices. After baking, sprinkle the top with freshly chopped tomatoes seasoned with a little salt, olive oil, and balsamic vinegar to round out the Caprese components.

You can also do a play on surf and turf if you have a spare tin of anchovies in your pantry by tossing the minced anchovies and chicken together and baking them on the pizza with a light sprinkling of extra shredded low-moisture mozzarella on top to hold things together. Once it's out of the oven, drizzle with a touch of garlic and lemon-infused olive oil, or add a little lemon zest to punch up the flavor. The oil from a jar of sundried tomatoes would also be delicious with this flavor profile.

It can also be fun to clean out your fridge a bit with your very own take on "garbage" pizza. Rotisserie chicken would be delicious with the addition of a few slices of minced, porky cold cuts, a few tablespoons of chopped black olives, and that last half of a green bell pepper and sliced red onion lingering in your crisper drawer.