Should have been called crème fraiche sauce pizza (Iceland Italian Style Cheese, Ham & Mushroom Pizza)

Member Name: pink_glitter

Product:	Iceland Italian Style Cheese, Ham & Mushroom Pizza
Date:	06/09/08 (94 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Tastes OK, reasonable price

Disadvantages: The creme fraiche sauce overpowers the rest of the topping

While shopping in Iceland earlier this week, I decided to get myself a couple of frozen pizzas. I must admit, I haven't had pizza for ages, but when I do have pizza I prefer to make my own. There are two problems with this - firstly it takes ages - the sauce alone takes 20 minutes to make - and secondly, the ingredients cost quite a lot. This means, that although they're not quite as fresh and don't taste quite as nice (to hell with modesty, I make a good pizza!), frozen pizzas are a lot more convenient.

This pizza is from the Iceland Italian Style range. Although it costs just £1.50, it is actually the most expensive of the own-brand pizzas Iceland make.

The pizza comes packaged in a pink cardboard box, which features a picture of the pizza on the front. It describes this as being 'The ultimate thin and crispy pizza' and lets us know that it contains no artificial colours or flavours.

The pizza is described as being 'stone baked, topped with tomato sauce, cheese and crème fraiche sauce, grated mozzarella, formed ham, mushrooms, marinated onions and smoked ham.' On removing the pizza from the packaging, I could see that it had a fair bit of topping - great, as some of the very cheap supermarket own brand pizzas are all base and hardly any topping on them at all!

The pizza is easy to cook, it simply goes on the middle shelf of your oven for 20-22 minutes.

Once cooked the pizza looked nice, but not like it did on the picture. The cheese and crème fraiche sauce was pretty much covering everything else on the top of the pizza, and the only thing you could really see apart from that, were the few large chunks of onion.

When I cut the pizza, I found the sauce was very creamy and also quite runny, so much so, it almost dripped off the pizza which I was a little surprised about.

Taste wise, the base was nice - crispy on the outside with more of a doughiness to the edges. Although the sauce was nice and very creamy, I found that it pretty much overpowered the taste of the rest of the pizza - I could not taste the ham or the mushrooms at all, and only knew they were there because of the change in texture, which was a shame - especially since this is supposed to be a ham and mushroom pizza!! The only time there was any variation on taste was when I came to a piece of onion, which gave it a bit of a kick.

Because of the fairly bland taste, caused by having so much of the creamy sauce, I could only manage to eat a little bit of this pizza, which I suppose is good for my waistline if nothing else!

Each half pizza contains -

392 calories
19.5g protein
50.3g carbohydrate
12.5g fat
2g salt

I don't think I would buy this pizza again. To me, it wasn't a ham and mushroom pizza, it was more a crème fraiche sauce pizza, which although it tasted OK, was a little bit creamy for my liking.

Summary: The ultimate pizza? Hardly