How to cook frozen pizza in the oven?

We tested nine methods, so you don't have to.

Take a close look at this. She won't look so good in the morning.

Order a pizza and there's a good chance it'll disappear within a few hours. Something about this round wheel of dough, melted cheese, warm tomato sauce and seemingly countless options for filling is simply irresistible. If only pizza could stay like this forever. However, it's hard to resist the temptation to eat the leftover pieces when you're rummaging through the refrigerator the next day. Maybe you like your pizza cold—there's no shame in that—but if you want to recapture the magic of fresh pizza by reheating it, then you need to know what to do.

So the DIY team at Popular Science tracked down the most popular strategies, bought a lot of pizza, and put them to the test. We were looking for the best option.

But first - decay, loss of freshness and spoilage

The moment the pizza comes out of the oven, it's too hot to eat and may not even be fully cooked.
But at about 140 degrees Fahrenheit, experts recommend starting to eat it ravenously without burning your mouth, at which point it begins its inevitable path toward complete decomposition, like everything else on Earth. If you can't (or don't want to) eat pizza when it's fresh, all you can do later is damage control. You see, cheese only likes to melt once because when it does, it loses its integrity. When exposed to high temperatures, cheese loses fat and water, and it is simply impossible to get it back.

"This water doesn't rise," says dough and pizza expert Francisco Migoya, executive chef at Modernist Cuisine. “The dough is like a sponge, so it will just soak it all up, becoming wet and sticky over time.”

At this point, moisture from the sauce and water, as well as fat from the cheese (and any meat), begins to seep into the crust, creating what pizza connoisseurs call the “gum line”—a layer between the sauce and the crust that looks like raw dough. The thicker the pizza, the more pronounced the gum line will be, and the longer the pizza sits untouched, the thicker it will become. This changes the crust forever, says Chef Migoya.

Never leave pizza on your kitchen countertop or in the oven overnight (due to bacteria), but putting it in the refrigerator won't do any good. Low temperatures freeze whatever the dough has absorbed and speed up the process of losing freshness or retrograding. In short, the starch in the crust recrystallizes, and all the freshness of the pizza is blown away by the wind.

How we did it

PopSci is based in New York City, so we tested each method using the thin crust pizza that the Big Apple is famous for.
If you reheat pizza in a Chicago-style deep dish or other container, your results may vary. The pieces we used (regular cheese and pepperoni) spent 12 to 48 hours in the refrigerator. Reheating frozen pizza is a completely different story, and we can't talk about that here.

Let the game begin.

The history of frozen pizza

The first frozen pizza appeared in the USA. Ron Cymek, the owner of the Grave Spring bar, came up with the idea of selling ready-made pizza frozen so that the buyer could heat it up and eat it hot at any convenient time. The frozen pizza, called Tombstone Pizza, quickly became a popular product.

A large fast food company, Kraft Foods, acquired all rights to it from Simek and began producing frozen pizza on an industrial scale under its own brand. The company's expenses for acquiring these rights paid off very quickly; already in 1986, it earned its first million from selling frozen pizza.

If you cook frozen pizza without plastic wrap in the microwave, you can cover it on top with a special plastic lid to protect the top layer from drying out.

Mini pizza in the microwave

Cooking time: half an hour.
Number of servings: 5 persons.
Calorie content of the dish: 259 kcal.
Purpose: for a snack.
Kitchen: author's.

Mini-pizza in the microwave will not take much of the housewife’s time, and the portion size will eliminate the need to divide the prepared piece of dough. To make the delicacy, classic pizza dough is kneaded and filled with whatever you can find at home. It is good to combine sausage with cheese, fresh or canned tomatoes, mayonnaise or ketchup. Be sure to season your pizza with herbs.

Ingredients:

milk – half a glass;
flour - a glass;
butter – 100 g;
eggs – 1 pc.;
tomato paste – half a glass;
soda – 5 g;
vinegar – 10 ml;
salami – 30 g;
bacon – 150 g;
tomatoes – 100 g;
hard cheese – 150 g;
dill - a bunch.

Cooking method:

Salt the egg, mix with a whisk, pour in the milk. Add sifted flour, soda and vinegar, knead the dough.
Roll out, cut out portions with a saucer, microwave for five minutes, turning on maximum power, brush with paste, microwave for three minutes.
Cut the sausage into half rings, the bacon into pieces, place on the dough, bake for five minutes.
Place the tomato pieces. After three minutes of baking, sprinkle with grated cheese and let melt.

Important tips: or rules for reheating pizza at home?

So, you have chosen a specific type of pizza and ordered it delivered to your home. After a short time, the finished, fresh, but slightly cooled product was delivered to the house. To restore its taste and aroma, you need to know the secrets of reheating it. You can get detailed information on how to reheat this blue cheese correctly in the following ways:

Ask through the search engine Yandex or Google.
Ask the forwarder who delivered the pizza to you.

At the Sushi v Dom company, the work of the forwarder is performed by specialists who know all the nuances in preparing this dish and the taste characteristics of each type. They will competently answer all questions and advise which drinks or foods to use to maximize the taste of a particular pizza.

To reheat pizza at home, they traditionally use such means as a microwave, oven, or frying pan.

The best way to heat it up is, of course, using a microwave. Only in a microwave oven do heat rays penetrate the entire area of the product, qualitatively bringing every millimeter of the heated dish to the required temperature.

The basic rules of the process of how to reheat pizza in the microwave are to set the microwave temperature to high and the heating time.

It takes little time to heat up pizza in the microwave: just a couple of minutes at maximum power. This is enough to heat every piece of dough and filling. The next step: remove the pizza from the microwave and let it cool (i.e., reach the desired temperature). What does “needed condition” mean? This is when the layer of cheese that was sprinkled on the filling softens and melts enough to saturate the entire filling and form a golden, aromatic crust on top.

Warm-up rules

When preparing store-bought pizza, you need to pay attention to the composition. If the filling includes raw minced meat or chicken, then it will take longer to defrost and bake such a semi-finished product.
Before heating the finished but cooled pizza, you can add slices of tomatoes or mushrooms to it. To make the delicacy look like it was just cooked, you should sprinkle it with olive oil and sprinkle with fresh cheese.
It is prohibited to place baked goods in a cardboard box in the oven. This poses a risk of fire. In addition, the pizza will be spoiled by the smell of cardboard and the harmful substances that the paint covering it releases when heated.

How to choose quality frozen pizza

Before you put the treasured product in the food basket at the supermarket, you should pay attention to some details:

Examine the pizza carefully. Give preference to the one that looks presentable. It is better if the cardboard packaging has a “window” so that you can clearly see what you are purchasing.
The plastic wrap should not be too tight on the pizza. There should be no layer of ice or deformation on it - this may indicate that the product may have been defrosted and frozen several times.
The cake should be golden brown, but not burnt.
Once you have thawed the product, check the cake for elasticity. If it bends, then you have chosen a quality pizza.

Now you know how to properly prepare frozen pizza in various ways. But before you buy this product in the store, keep in mind that you can prepare healthier, tastier, aromatic, piping-hot baked goods yourself at home and prepare them for future use. To do this, you just need to knead a double portion of the dough and use more ingredients for the filling, put the unbaked base in the freezer, and then just reheat it when your guests arrive. It won’t take much time, but your pizza will be no worse than from a pizzeria.

There are many varieties of pizza: some housewives cook it, contrary to the classic recipe, using puff pastry, believing that the taste does not suffer from this at all, on the contrary, it is enriched. Others use unusual ingredients for the filling, combining, for example, vegetable components with smoked meats, boiled sausage with pineapples, etc.

What's the best way to reheat?

Some people think it's best to reheat frozen pizza in the microwave. In fact, although this method is fast, it significantly worsens the taste of the product. The cheese takes on a rubbery consistency.

The frying pan allows you to heat the pizza evenly. The heat from its surface forms an appetizing crust, and the steam generated under the lid adds juiciness. This way, cold pizza turns into something that looks like it just came out of the oven - with gooey cheese, soft dough and a crispy crust.

Video: how to make pizza in the microwave

Found an error in the text?
Select it, press Ctrl + Enter and we will fix everything! An excellent alternative to store-bought semi-finished products. If your family loves pizza, you can prepare it a few days ahead and freeze it. The ingredients listed in the recipe make 8 mini pizzas. You can put together different fillings for them, vegetable, meat or fish. Of course, you will spend a little of your time preparing semi-finished pizza, but within a month you will enjoy your favorite homemade pizza without any problems.

Ingredients:

2-3 cups water
2 teaspoons dry yeast
2 teaspoons sugar
5-6 cups bread flour
2-3 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt or to taste

Cooking method:

Take a large bowl, pour 5 cups of flour into it, add sugar, salt, yeast, mix everything well. After this, pour a little water and use a large wooden spoon to knead the dough. Next, add olive oil and gradually add water. The dough should be stiff and homogeneous. After the dough has formed, take a large clean bowl, lightly grease it with vegetable oil and place the finished dough into it. Cover with a towel and leave to rise in a warm place. As soon as the dough increases in size, knead it again and let it rise.

After these procedures, put the dough on a dough board and divide it into two parts. Then we divide each part into 4 parts, you should get 8 small pieces of pizza dough. Next, roll small pieces of dough into a ball, then sprinkle the table with flour and roll the ball into a circle with a diameter of 12-15 cm. Place the prepared flat cakes on a baking sheet.

Then remove from the oven and let the cake cool. After that, put the crust on a parchment sheet, then put the filling you need on it and put the pizza blank in the freezer for 3 hours.

Then we take the frozen pizza out of the freezer, wrap the pizza in plastic wrap or put it in a vacuum bag; a vacuum food sealer can always be purchased on a specialized website; this is an excellent option for long-term food storage. Return the packaged pizza back to the freezer. Your pizza will keep this way for 3-4 weeks.

All you have to do is preheat the oven to 220⁰C, and remove the film and bake the pizza for 10-15 minutes or until done.

Rules for heating pizza in the oven

If you don't have a microwave, you should know how to reheat pizza in the oven.

The heating process is similar:

take the dish out of the refrigerator,
let it gradually warm up to room temperature,
transfer to baking paper and place in an oven preheated to 200C for 15 minutes. This time is enough for the crust of the dough to brown and the filling to regain the flavor lost in the refrigerator, i.e. The pizza looked like it had just been made.

Before placing this dish in the oven, you can add fresh chopped herbs, tomatoes, and spices to it - they will quickly replenish the lost taste.

Recommendations on how to properly reheat pizza in the oven and the rules for reheating this dish in any other way are basically the same. The main thing to remember is: if you leave the pizza in the oven, the juiciness of the product will disappear, and dryness (even staleness) will appear. And if little time was allowed for heating, then the aroma of the constituent components will not develop, and will remain half frozen.