End result is a giant wodge of bread dough with tomatoey stuff and brown(!) cheese on it. (Goodfellas Deep Pan Pizza)

Member Name: worst_trip

Product:	Goodfellas Deep Pan Pizza
Date:	30/09/09 (33 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A convenience food, allegedly.

Disadvantages: Why would anyone in their right mind want to eat a deep-pan pizza?

I have a shocking confession to make: I don't much care for Itallian food in general and in particular I have a bit of a life-long aversion to pizza.

Despite not really liking it, I do buy frozen / chilled pizza from the supermarket on occasion as it's a cheap convenience food which the sprog will eat when all else fails. I usually opt for whatever variety is selling on special offer as whether you pay a quid for it, or four times as much, it's all one to me really.

Last week Tesco were selling a frozen deep-pan 'Goodfellas' pizza for a quid - which is half price - so that's what we had that day for lunch. You could get a four-cheese variety, or pepperoni. Frozen thinly sliced meat products are more often than not a disaster to eat once they've thawed / been re-cooked, I find, so I chose the 'four cheese' variety.

And what were those four cheeses? Gourmet Itallian treats such Ricotta? Or Parmesan? Gorgnzola? Dolcellate? Even bog-standard old Mozarella? Well, there was something annato-bright-orange coloured and something pale yellow in grated flakes on top of the pizza but it was nothing Itallian, I shouldn't think. After cooking I struggled to discern four types of anything on top of the Goodfellas pizza - and that includes the tomato topping, quite frankly, as everything cooked down to a uniform shade of sludge-brown.

I now see that 'Goodfellas' pizza is made by an Irish company called Green Isle foods - which seems in terms of the brand's fake Itallian credentials as singularly apt as when I found out that disgusting Sara Lee frozen 'gateaux' are in fact made by a company that also specializes in manufacturing household chemicals (including disgusting, repulsive 'Ambi Pur' air freshener, Sanex anti-bacterial body-wash, and Kiwi shoe polish.)

So the Goodfellas pizza quite shocked me as when it came out of the packet as I'd never had one before. It was this enormously thick round wodge of dough, thinly skimmed with the tomatoey stuff, and the (alleged) four cheeses. This 'pizza topping' sat on the incredibly substantial 'deep pan' matrix of - basically bread - much in the manner of the thin surface layer of 'green scuzz' coating the continental plates that we live on, on this our planet Earth's crust. The packaging stated that the pizza would take about 25 minutes to cook on account of its being a deep-pan one. This is twice as long as it takes a regular, or non-deep-pan pizza to bake.

In the event, in our unreliable Ikea fan oven (that may or may not actually be the grill setting after all) it cooked to the aforementioned uniform nut-brown all over in about 15 minutes. It wasn't all that awful - since I've experienced the dreadful frame of reference of having eaten budget chilled pizzas from 'Spar' type convenience shops in the 1980s, after all (and in Scotland, in the 1970s, they used to make what they called 'pizza' out of squeezy tomato paste mixed with raw sliced onions, all sitting on a square slab of raw scone dough - scone dough! I kid you not!) but it wasn't all that great either. The tomato stuff on the Goodfellas pizza had soaked into the deep-pan big slice of bread quite a bit which didn't really help the texture.

Despite not liking pizza, about 20 years ago I did have a very memorably nice one once. It was on a thin crust, the lightly tomatoey topping swimming with delicious olive oil and there was not too much cheese, and more importantly, only one variety of it.

The Goodfellas four cheese pizza was nothing, absolutely NOTHING like that.

Summary: Product about as Itallian as Green Isle Foods, the Irish company that makes it.