Frozen Pizzas are a staple in many college students’ diets. The Dakota Student’s Brendan McCabe chows down in a best-of-the-worst frozen pizza throw down. Photo courtesy of  goodhousekeeping.com

As a poor college kid with a penchant fort late night snacks, I have eaten a lot of pizza in my day. While normally any pizza is good pizza at 2 a.m., I can tell you from experience there is such a thing as bad pizza, and it’s usually found in the frozen food section of your local grocery store. Over the course of two days, I made it my mission to find the best of the worst in take-and-bake frozen pizzas.

Jack’s Pizza – Price: $2.50

Jack’s Pizzas are the ones you grew up eating over at a friend’s house during a sleepover. Adjusted to college life, Jack’s Pizzas are the ones you put in the oven while intoxicated, burn and then eat anyway. But memories and drunken stupors are no way to rate a pizza, so I sat down harshly sober Monday afternoon and gave the pepperoni and sausage pizza a try.

For being a $2.50 pizza, Jack’s is surprisingly tasty. Despite the price, it has the right amount of cheese and toppings and a crunchy, cracker-thin crust.

While I cannot recommend it, I did see a roommate eat two of these pizzas, smothered in ranch, in an hour and a half. It was an intriguing, yet frightening, spectacle that I could not take my eyes off of. I add this anecdote just to show you that yes, it is in fact possible to eat over 2,500 calories in pizza in less than two hours without having a spontaneous heart attack. Follow your dreams, boys and girls.

Overall, Jack’s Pizza earns 4 out of 5 stars for its value and above average taste.

Pizza Corner  – $6 to $10.50

Though Pizza Corner’s meat lover’s offering can be found on sale, it topped DiGiorno for the most expensive pizza on the list by a wide margin. While $2.50 is the kind of money left in your pocket after you go to the movies, $10.50 isn’t mere pocket change. $10.50 can buy you over 40 packets of Ramen noodles or even pay  .0013 percent of the average yearly tuition at UND.

In conclusion, that is a lot of money to spend on a frozen pizza even if it is made fresh
in North Dakota.

The toppings on this pizza certainly seemed higher quality than the rest, until I took a bite of one of its chunks of ground beef. Have you ever bitten a sponge? Me neither, but the texture of the beef is exactly what I assume it feels like. The meat had a strange squishiness to it that, coupled with the hamburger-esque flavor, felt like it was something I should probably not be eating.

For being a meat lover’s pizza it was surprisingly bland, with its only saving grace being the very well-made crust.

For being expensive yet surprisingly average in the taste department, Pizza Corner earns a 3 out of 5 stars.

DiGiorno – $5.50

Before making the DiGiorno’s pizza, I was already prepared to hate it. With all of the annoying commercials and ads touting how this frozen pizza is better than delivery, DiGiorno is more overhyped than the videogame “Watch Dogs” was in 2014. For people with real hobbies and ambitions in life, that roughly equates to DiGiorno being more overhyped than the new Star Wars movie.

Upon actually eating the pizza, I grudgingly accepted that it was extremely flavorsome. Compared to Pizza Corner’s bland flavor and holier-than-thou price, DiGiorno had ample seasonings and only a mildly pretentious price.

It should be noted that I personally observed another roommate battle not once, but twice for well over a minute to get a pizza out of a DiGiorno’s box. Let this junior in chemical engineering’s struggle be a lesson to you: Book smarts mean nothing in the world of frozen pizzas.

Given the great taste yet relatively high cost, DiGiorno grudgingly earns 4 out of 5 stars.

Roma – $1.50

While the $1.50 price of a Roma did not set the bar particularly high, the pizza still managed to belly crawl underneath whatever expectations I had set for it.

While Jack’s Pizza had cracker-thin crust, Roma’s pizza was about as thick as a stack of two credit cards. The fact that a machine could create such a razor thin crust should be proof that technology has gone too far.

On top of the pizza was random spots of cheese and pepperoni that was sparse at best, and the whole combination somehow managed to not really taste like pizza in the end. This phenomenon is difficult to explain, but it can be best described as what the outcome of asking someone to make a pizza without any of the ingredients used to make pizza would be.

Despite its attractive price tag, Roma’s overall quality and the eerie feeling of fake pizza earns it a whopping 2 out of 5 stars.

Brendan McCabe is a copy editor for The Dakota Student. He can be reached at [email protected]