Pizza is a dish that’s loved universally, and while it’s always better when cooked fresh, sometimes you just can’t beat the frozen kind, especially if you’re all out of ideas of what to cook for dinner. But even if you’re looking to save a bit of time and money by staying in with a frozen pizza, that doesn’t mean you have to skimp on the quality of it.
A pizza retrieved from the back of your freezer might not look so appealing, but you can easily recreate that restaurant-style crunch by doing one simple thing before adding it to your oven. Even if you keep it in the oven for a few minutes extra, you’ve probably noticed that frozen pizzas often lack that golden crust you find at restaurants, but a little bit of olive oil can fix this.
In a recent article, Food Republic shared how to transform frozen pizzas with a few easy tricks, including brushing the crusts with olive oil before cooking to ensure you get a “golden crust”.
Explaining how it works on their website, Uncle Al’s Pizza said: “Oil locks in moisture while crisping the outside. It’s like armor for your dough, keeping it from drying out in the oven’s inferno.”
While adding oil can help you achieve a restaurant-style crust instead of the chewy and soft dough you might often experience with oven pizzas, getting the heat right is another game-changer.
Oven pizzas get much hotter than standard ovens, which can make a big difference to the texture of your pizza.
However, you can mimic this by preheating your oven to the highest temperature 30 minutes before cooking, advises Food Republic.
They also recommend leaving your pizza to thaw before cooking to ensure a more evenly-cooked and crisp serving, but keep an eye on it as cooking it at a higher heat will mean it shouldn’t need as long as stated on the box.
While frozen pizzas are often a convenient option for dinner, that doesn’t mean you can’t jazz them up a little, and you can even experiment with adding some garlic or fresh herbs to the olive oil before brushing it over the crust.