I slammed Amy's Kitchen pretty hard the other day with the whole Macaroni and Soy Cheeze thing. The problems I had with their product were arguably not the company's fault - the labeling could have been better, but as far as I know there might be no way to make fake cheese taste good. I thought I would give them another chance and try one of their other products.
First of all, as you can see in the photo above, this product looks unappetizing. It lacks cheese, or any kind of approximation of cheese. It also lacks much in the way of tomato sauce, which I found odd. The mashed up sweet onions give the pizza a dark greenish-black color which doesn't exactly get my stomach rumbling. The artichokes and mushrooms looked pretty good, though.
The cooking times on frozen pizzas are always way off, so I generally judge when a pizza is cooked by the meltedness and color of the cheese. Without cheese, it was tough to know when to take the damn thing out of the oven. I ended up having to open the oven and poke it in the middle with my finger until I eventually burned myself.
With a burned finger and some serious misgivings about eating a pizza that looked like a car tire, I bit into this thing expecting the worst. I was pleasantly surprised, it tasted really good. The crust reminded me a lot of focaccia bread my mother used to make, and the vegetables tasted almost fresh. Artichoke hearts are a great pizza topping and the mushrooms tasted as good as the ones from my usual mushroom-and-sausage from Papa John's. The red peppers were pretty tasteless, but they added some texture.
So was it tasty? Yes. Was it pizza? That I can't say. Whether something without cheese can be called "pizza" is beyond my ken. While this provided a satisfying meal, it definitely wouldn't quell my craving if I were lusting after pizza.
Overall Grade: B+
Note: Amy's also sells several other kinds of vegetarian pizza which aren't vegan but look pretty good. I'd avoid the Soy Cheeze one, although I haven't tried it; the macaroni dish didn't make me want to try more "Cheeze" products. This pizza looks like the pizza I had only with cheese, I would definitely give this a shot after my challenge is over.
