Dr. Gourmet's Food Reviews

Bold Organics Vegan Cheese Pizza

Vegan Cheese Pizza and Veggie Lovers Pizza

I am always skeptical when I see new pizza in the freezer case. This is a bit like playing roulette, with a poor chance of real success, but occasionally we come across a decent pizza.

Choosing the Bold Organics felt like a turn of the roulette wheel that we were going to come up on the losing side of. The package says gluten free, milk free, and egg free, and I had to wonder if it would be taste free also. It clearly violated our "too much salt" rule, but this is what folks face who have food intolerances - generally poorer quality food that is heavy on saturated fat and especially sodium. I can't see why companies see the need to have 1/4 of a day's recommended sodium in a single serving of pizza - 1/2 of the pie in this case (and people will effectively eat the whole pie meaning that they are consuming 50% of the recommended sodium in a single meal).

Cooked in the oven as per their recommendations, the pie came out with a slightly limp crust. That is the first thing one notices when tasting - the texture of the crust was uniformly described as doughy by our tasters. About 1/2 inch of the edge of the crust is too crispy and the texture of the center resembles raw pizza dough.

That, in and of itself, is impossible to overlook, but the tasting went from bad to worse. The flavor of the Vegan Cheese Pizza was very similar to the pizza you had in elementary school. Super sweet tomato sauce with not much more flavor except for salt. You can taste every atom of the 670 milligrams of sodium in the pizza. So much so, it feels like your mouth is burning.

The Veggie Lovers Pizza went from bad to worse... to even worse. There is an inexplicable metallic and chemical taste that one taster likened to "red peppers with the flavor of aluminum foil."

These are supremely bad pizzas in every fashion. The crust is bad, they are so salty as to be offensive on the tongue, the tomato sauce has the flavor of a school cafeteria and the veggie pizza has an offensive metallic aftertaste.

There is a reason that I don't play at the roulette table in casinos, as I will almost certainly lose. This is true of tasting frozen pizza, but as we say here at Dr. Gourmet, "we eat it, so you don't have to," and Bold Organics pizzas are really, really bad.

Reviewed: June 21, 2013