Leonardo's Spinach & Cheese Pizza

Todays food review was a completely unexpected find, as I had actually never even heard of this company.

Last week the wife, my son, and I were at Brookshires Market (a much larger version of the regular Brookshires grocery store) and we happened upon this little gem.  She had never had Chicago style pizza, and I am a HUGE fan, so this was a must.

It was pretty expensive for a frozen pizza, coming in at I believe $12.99, but it was still too promising to pass up.  They had Pepperoni and Spinach, and we clearly chose the latter.

So lets dive into this bad boy.

As soon as I took it out of the box I realized that this was a little different from your standard open and bake pizza.  First I had to thaw the sauce in hot water (microwaving would work too), and then pour it on the pizza once the over was preheated.

Next, I had to tear two long strips of foil, place the pizza over them, and cover the edges of the crust down to the sauce.  This was clearly to allow the thick inside of the pizza to cook without burning the crust.

Once it had cooked for 25 minutes I took it out and removed all of the foil, and put her back in all hot and naked for another 15.

I ended up burning the top of the crust slightly, but it wasnt enough to affect taste.

The pizza was a little smaller than I thought it would be, which did make sense since it was SOOO thick and each slice was only 320 cals, which is pretty standard for a slice of hand tossed or deep dish pizza.

We waited about 10 minutes to eat because we didn't want to give it to our son really hot (and he ended up refusing to even touch it lol), but that ended up hurting our pizza devouring experience a little.  The cheese cooled and began to harder surprisingly quickly, and really wasn't hot and melty at all by the time we started eating.

Of course I added my obligatory parmesan and red peppers, which no piece of pizza is complete without.  Pizza has no flavor without a touch of heat!!  Or at least thats what I keep trying to tell everyone...

  

So how was it??  In a word, AWESOME!  You could never tell that this was a frozen pizza, it was just as good or better than anything I have had from most pizza joints.  The crust was flaky and crispy which was perfect for this style, (actually it says on the box to cut it with a serrated knife, which made sense when you were trying to get through that crust).

The sauce was fairly sweet and quite flavorful, and there was just enough of it on there.  Sauce tends to make or break a pizza for me a lot of the time.  Its not so much about flavor issues, but the fact that having too much or too little kills the experience.

Even though the cheese had began to harden it was still delicious.  It was clearly not low fat, nor would I ever want it to be.  I'm sure it would have been even better straight from the oven.

My main complaint was the spinach.  I prefer larger pieces in my pizza.  Like, entire spinach leaves.  This was pretty shredded and it really didn't stand out at all.  This wasn't a huge deal, but it could have been better.  My wife was the opposite though, she's not crazy about spinach on pizza in the first place so this was perfect for her.  It was awesome to find a spinach pizza without that nasty white sauce most places insist on putting on it though...

I didn't find this pizza to be as filling as I had hoped for.  I worked half of this baby into my day and sadly it was a fairly unsatisfying 1,300 cals.  I didn't regret eating it at all, I had just hoped for a little more bang for my buck.  My wife had planned on eating 3 slices and ended up only eating 2 because she was stuffed, so dont take my impression here as gospel.

Will I buy again?

Hell yes.  I would really like to try the pepperoni one next.

RATING - 8.5/10

One final note that I found pretty cool is that apparently each of these is hand made!  At least thats what it says on the box.