Aldi Take & Bake Pizza (Mama Cozzi’s) Review
Author’s note: I have no affiliation with Aldi, and I was not compensated in any way for this review.
Dark magic sold separately.
I haven’t had great experiences with grocery store pizzas. I do eat them, but it’s always a tragic compromise of taste and quality. It took a while to build up enough fragile “Aldi confidence” to try this Take and Bake Pizza from their Mama Cozzi’s store brand. I walked past these pizzas for months before I reluctantly slid one into my shopping cart.
But let’s back up. This is not a frozen pizza. It’s a fresh, “grab-and-go” option, located with the refrigerated entrees. While this brand (Mama Cozzi’s) offers some frozen pizzas, they have an entire line of these fresh guys, too.
These jumbo dudes are sold in cardboard boxes that look just like the kind you would get from a pizza joint. I find the box baffling — you can’t store leftover slices in it, because there’s a big hole cut in the top.
And it takes up a truly gosh-awful amount of extra space in the refrigerator (or even in your car, on your ride home from the store). Plus, the wasted packaging.
It’s a useless box. I don’t get it. I’d gladly buy just the pizza shrink wrapped to the cardboard disk inside.
Anyway. No one asked my opinion, did they? No.
Aldi offers several different varieties of this pizza, including Five Cheese, Supreme, Ultimate Meat, and Pepperoni. There are also different crust options — traditional crust, thin crust, and even a cauliflower crust option. I love thin crust pizza, so naturally that’s what I chose.
Sadly, the raw crust on my pizza was already broken by the time I brought it home — and I discovered transferring the wobbly dough circle to a baking sheet required surgeon-level finesse.
Or maybe I’m a clumsy rodent. It’s probably that.
The baking instructions on the box say to place the pizza directly on the (pre-heated) oven rack. Ain’t no way! The crust is fragile and floppy (it’s not frozen!), and the toppings are loose. I could barely shift the pizza to a baking sheet without it falling apart. I don’t have the dark magic required to get this onto my oven rack.
This pizza also doesn’t quite fit on my LARGEST baking sheet. My special, fancy, gargantuan baking sheet. My preternaturally enormous baking pan. The pan I cannot even squeeze into my normal-sized kitchen sink.
Alas. The pizza does. not. fit. It hangs slightly off the sides. Gah. It made my big baking sheet look like a clown car.
I even polled my Facebook friends, because I was so baffled by this. One friend said he bakes his Aldi pizzas on a pizza stone (I called him “bougie” in jealous retaliation), and another friend said (vaguely) that she always puts it directly on her oven rack. Apparently, she has the dark magic skills I lack. Bah.
Anyway. I baked the dang, broken thing on my clown-car baking sheet. And it came out amazing. AMAZING.
And now I don’t really care about all the inconveniences and kitchen bloopers. This pizza is stupendous. I mean, really, really excellent. It’s worth the oven-wrangling. It’s worth feeling like a clumsy rodent.
What makes it ssssoooo good? Well, for starters, the crust is wonderfully crisp and delicate. It would probably be crisper if I managed to bake this on my oven rack, but it was still pretty fabulous the way I did it.
There’s a generous amount of meat — three kinds, in fact. The sausage flavor is fantastic — slightly sweet and slightly spicy, but wonderfully soft and tender. Big, fragrant blobs of sausage. The biggest sausage blobs ever. A truly “meaty” pizza.
I could have done with more cheese, probably. But we can always do with more cheese, no? What I DO like about this cheese is that there are three different kinds: mozzarella, provolone, and parmesan. The cheese flavor is better than many restaurant pizzas I have tried. More dimensional, and complex.
There’s not a ton of sauce on this pizza, either, but somehow it works. If you’re a die-hard sauce-lover, you may want to get a separate jar of marinara sauce to use for dipping. There’s only a gentle smear here.
I guess it’s alllll the flavors that really “do” it for me. This pizza is super savory and satisfying. The sprinkle of fresh oregano, parsley, and dehydrated garlic on top really brings everything together. But I also love the texture changes from the ultra-thin, crunchy pepperoni slices, to the tender sausage blobs, to the small, chewy pepperoni cubes. As the kids say: “I’m obsessed!”
Nutrition Facts in Aldi Take & Bake Pizza
There are six servings per 16-inch pizza of 400 calories each. This is pizza, so I am not going to gaslight you by pretending it is healthy. 1/6th a pizza has 25 grams of fat, 18 grams of protein, and 25 grams of carbohydrates.
Also, good luck only eating one serving. You will probably need dark magic for that, too.
There’s a glimmer of good news: a slice includes 2 grams of fiber and 20% of your daily value of Calcium, and 8% of your Iron. The Salt Police want you to know that there is also 45% your daily sodium per serving. I love salt (and need a lot of it), so this doesn’t bother me.
Ingredients in Aldi Thin Crust Sausage & Pepperoni Pizza
Here are the ingredients from the label:
Crust:
- Wheat Flour
- Water
- Soybean Oil
- Cultured Wheat Starch
- Salt
- Yeast
- Sugar
- Citric Acid
- L-Cysteine
Cheeses:
- Low Moisture Mozzarella Cheese (Pasteurized milk, Cheese cultures, Salt, Enzymes)
- Provolone Cheese (Pasteurized milk, Cheese cultures, Salt, Enzymes)
- Grated Parmesan Cheese (Parmesan Cheese [Pasteurized part-skim milk, Cheese cultures, Salt, Enzymes], Cellulose [Anti-caking]
Sauce:
- Water
- Tomato Paste
- Soybean Oil
- Salt
- Seasoning (Salt, Paprika, Spices, Onion powder, Garlic powder, Parmesan cheese [Pasteurized cultured part-skim milk, salt, enzymes], Spices, Garlic Powder
Pepperoni:
- Pork
- Beef
- Salt
- Spices
- Dextrose
- Lactic Acid Starter Culture
- Oleoresin of Paprika
- Flavoring
- Sodium Nitrite
- BHA
- BHT
- Citric Acid
Cooked Spicy Italian Sausage with Garlic:
- Pork
- Spices
- Water
- Salt
- Paprika
- Sugar
- Garlic Powder
- Flavorings
- Oleoresin of Paprika
Garnish
- Dehydrated Garlic
- Oregano
- Parsley
Whew! That’s quite the list. My little typing fingers are plumb tuckered out. Most of these ingredients are pretty decent. The ones I don’t like are: Soybean Oil, Nitrites, BHA, BHT. It’s nice to see Cultured Wheat Starch used as a natural preservative for the crust.
How to Cook Aldi Take & Bake Pizza
Here are the baking instructions from the back of the box. You are not allowed to bake this on the cardboard circle it comes with. No, I don’t know what happens if you do. Maybe you go directly to pizza jail.
I cooked mine longer than the recommended time of 12-15 minutes — it took about 17 minutes at 400 degrees for my pizza to look brown and crispy. Probably because I couldn’t wrangle it onto my oven rack. Alas.
If you want to jazz up your Aldi pizza with extra toppings, this article from Simply Recipes has some suggestions for easy additions, plus re-heating ideas for leftovers.
Price & Shelf-Life of Mama Cozzi’s Take & Bake Aldi Pizza
The 30.5 ounce pizza cost $7.49 at my local store. Since there are 6 servings per pizza, this is $1.25 per serving.
My pizza expired a few days after purchase, so I did not delay in stuffing it inside my belly.
Dramatic Conclusion
Not only would I buy this pizza again, I already did. I regret nothing. 10/10, even with the abominable oven-wrangling, baking-sheet shaming, and nonsensical cardboard box. Buy it! Or don’t — leave it ALL for me!
The end.
More Reviews of Aldi Products You Might Like (or Hate)
Check out a few other reviews of Aldi stuff I’ve written:
