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The California Pizza Kitchen is a wildly popular sit-down restaurant that made the savvy decision to sell its beloved pies in the frozen section for us to enjoy at home. And the selection of frozen pies is nearly as extensive as the restaurant menu. We sampled and ranked 12 California Pizza Kitchen frozen pies, and our favorite is a cheese lover’s dream.
California Pizza Kitchen’s six-cheese Neapolitan-style crust pizza earned the top ranking based on taste, texture, memorability, and delivery of advertised ingredients. A six-cheese pizza stands out by the sheer number of different types of cheeses, hand-picked to offer a range of complementary tastes and textures. The salty, nutty Parmesan and Romano, creaminess of the ricotta, stretchy and rich mozzarella, and smoky gouda create a complex and elevated cheese pizza. While pizzas that feature multiple cheeses are often white pizzas, the foundation of this six-cheese pizza was a wonderfully aromatic, creamy red sauce with garlic and basil that brings much-needed acidity and umami to cut through the rich and robust cheeses.
The bubbly, chewy, and fluffy Neapolitan crust won our vote for best texture. Not only was the inside light, soft, and chewy, but the outer crust provided a nice crunchy contrast. Cheese lovers and Neapolitan-style pizza lovers will find their new favorite with California Pizza Kitchen’s six cheese pizza, and all pizza lovers will appreciate its expert craftsmanship.
More glowing reviews for California Pizza Kitchen
Five-star reviews for California Pizza Kitchen’s six-cheese Neapolitan crust pizza abound. A Safeway customer noted the restaurant-quality taste and texture by saying, “The flavors are well-balanced, not too overpowering, making it a good option for those who appreciate a more refined frozen pizza.” Customers also loved the ratio of sauce to cheese and how the six-cheese pizza didn’t skimp on any ingredients. The crust was one of the most common sources of praise; one Target customer put it nicely by saying it’s “crispy, but not too thin, chewy, but not too thick, the perfect ratio- and it doesn’t just taste like cardboard like a lot of other frozen pizzas.” That said, you can only achieve those crisp edges and browned bits of crunchy cheese if you bake a frozen pizza. So, let that be a lesson to frozen pizza lovers to never cook a frozen pizza in the microwave!
Not only did California Pizza Kitchen’s six-cheese Neapolitan pizza win over all other frozen pies under its brand, but we also loved its four-cheese pizza more than that of DiGiorno’s in a side-by-side brand comparison. In fact, California Pizza Kitchen was among our favorite frozen pizza brands out of the 30 different frozen pizzas we sampled; if six-cheese pizza isn’t what you’re looking for, the thin crust white pizza, thin crust Sicilian pizza, and thin crust BBQ chicken pizza were in our top 11 out of 30 frozen pizzas.
