Not for me - Tesco Stone Baked Pizza Bread (Tesco Garlic Pizza Bread)

Member Name: MEL0611

Product:	Tesco Garlic Pizza Bread
Date:	17/09/09 (103 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good taste of Garlic, oils and parsley

Disadvantages: Very dry, mnot enough moisture. Poor value for money

When looking for something a little different to do for my tea one evening I spent a few moments browsing the aisles of Tesco. I wanted an accompaniment to go with my spaghetti bolognaise. I was looking at all the different varieties of Garlic Bread that the store had on offer and found the Garlic Stone baked Pizza base.

The Garlic Pizza base was something that I had never tried before having previously brought the garlic dough balls and the garlic bread sticks and for whatever reason I had never even noticed the Garlic bread pizza base before, I am one of those people who just flies round the supermarket in a blur these days, grabbing all my items in a 20 minute shopping spree!

The Garlic Pizza bread cost me £1.00. This is the price I have paid in the past for Garlic Breads so was happy with the cost and it did look like a generous amount of food for the cost.

Once I had decided to make my purchase and go for the Stone baked bread all I had to do was go home and cook it! The packaging is quite simple on this product; you can clearly see the bread through a clear transparent plastic wrapper. The dough bread feels quite light and is 170g in size. The front of the packaging bares the name of the product and the Tesco logo whilst the back has nutritional information, ingredients used and cooking instructions. The pizza sits upon a black, round base, which is made of polystyrene.

To cook the garlic pizza bread you can only cook in the oven. To do this you need to remove all of the packaging, including the base and put the bread directly into your oven (no need for a baking tray so therefore less washing up!) You need to have pre- heated the oven and have it set on Gas mark 6 or 200 C and leave it to cook for 7 - 9 minutes. (This is the time for cooking from chilled). You can home freeze the bread but I stored it in my fridge so cooking times need to be adjusted slightly for you to cook from frozen.

I found that the product needed to be cooked for slightly longer than this and gave it just over 10 minutes to cook. It is difficult to tell how the cooking process is going as it does not go a 'golden' colour; you just have to judge on time and temperature.

Once I had removed the bread form the oven the smell was lovely, a garlic aroma filling my kitchen and a slight smell of toast accompanied this. I decided to cut the pizza bread into 6 triangle sections, similar to how a pizza would be served. I found it difficult to cut these sections at first, not because the crust was tough but that the dough seamed thick in texture and quite tough. Once I had broken through the bread the big test was the taste...

I have to admit to being a little disappointed with the product when it came to the taste. The bread was quite dry even though the topping contained garlic, oil and unsalted butter. When I have had garlic breads in the past the centre has always been very moist and yet this pizza base was quite dry. There was a lovely taste of the garlic, combined with parsley but this is only one of the few things that I can give a positive comment about. The pizza was not too doughy and being stone baked did give a slightly different taste to the regular garlic breads however the fact that it was so dry spoilt the overall taste. As previously said, I was serving the bread with spaghetti bolognaise so I could dip the bread into my bolognaise sauce, but if I had known this then I could have just brought a crusty loaf!

It is a shame the garlic pizza base was not what I expected as from the look of it I thought it was going to be moist and full of lovely garlic and oils.

A few nutritional pieces of information are as follows: (Per serving)

Calories ~ 315
Fat ~ 16.7g
Saturates ~ 7.8g
Sugar ~ 2.6g
Salt ~ 0.9g

In summary, I will not be buying this Stone baked Garlic Pizza bread again. I was very disappointed. I will be sticking with the garlic bread or garlic based products that I have used in the past. Sorry Tesco!

Thanks for reading.

Summary: Never again!