Lean Cuisine Review #3: Pizza Margherita

Tomatoes, red onions, garlic, basil & reduced fat mozzerella [sic] cheese with an olive oil tomato sauce on a crispy thin crust.

Image courtesy thespicybananas.com

Behold. The pizza margherita is perhaps the truest and best form of the art of pizza-making that is or will ever be. If pizza was a band, and the toppings combinations were its songs, "pizza margherita" would be the one that's played as the second encore on the last concert of their farewell tour. The combination of the soft, salty cheese, sweet tomatoes, fresh, crisp basil atop a crust of the simplest ingredients toasted to a crusty perfection in a wood-fired oven - it's perfection in its simplicity.

Of course, there are some liberties that can be taken with the recipe: some artisans prefer to use tomato sauce instead of fresh tomatoes, some choose to finish the pizza with a splash of olive oil, and - if you're Lean Cuisine, ignore all tradition altogether and create a margherita in only the vaguest definition of the word. Continuing on the band analogy, if pizza is a hugely-successful rock band, this version of its classic ditty "margherita" would be the shitty cover your loser brother has been trying to master on his guitar in his room for the past three weeks.

Certainly if you're over the age of sixteen you've had at least one run-in with microwave pizzas, but, if not, here's how it works - the frozen item is placed atop a flat piece of cardboard, the top side of which has a metallic circle upon which the pizza sits. The metal helps reflect the microwaves, which toasts the bottom of the pie at a higher temperature than the rest of the pizza cooks. The back of the box said that it only took a scant two minutes and thirty seconds to cook the pie, though if I wanted crispy crusts, I could leave it in for another fifteen seconds. Not being a communist, I cooked the pizza for 2:45.

The first thing that hit me was a big scent of basil that came from the large amount of dried stuff that I could clearly see sitting on top of the pizza. I guess the intent was to use the herbs to cover up the tastelessness of the "mozzerella" cheese, which tasted like a combination of salt and bad dreams. Though I use canned tomatoes on a very frequent basis, they're can't replace those recipes that call for fresh varieties, imposing a curious staleness in texture and flavor. I don't know why LC even bothered using "fresh" tomatoes, because there was also a base of tomato sauce, which tasted better anyway, though it provided a slick surface for that terrible amateurish experience when you take a bite of pizza and half of the damn cheese comes sliding off into your mouth, leaving your next three bites of pizza being nothing but crust. The crust was like many other pizzas in its field - tough and chewy, though there's a little hint of olive oil and garlic powder that took some of the edge off. Crispy? What do you think?

Lean Cuisine and other diet frozen dinners have been getting a bad rap for years because they didn't just taste bad - they tasted really, really bad, and it made people sad at times in their lives when their body image was already plenty sad in itself. There are some (relatively) decent Lean Cuisines, but in a case like this where they take a dish renowned for its freshness and purity and make it out of crappy frozen ingredients and salt, it makes me :'(  . The only consolation is that I noshed on this as a slightly-inebriated late night snack, so I didn't have to rely on this as my only means of sustenance for eight hours.

Score: 3 1/2 forks out of a possible 79.