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On this week’s Midnight Snack, we took a dive into a Totino’s Party Pizza: Hamburger Edition. Or something like that. Back in the 50’s, Totino’s started as a classic ma and pa operation with Jim and Rose Totino making pizzas for friends and family. Gradually, it grew into a bigger business, was sold a few times and now General Mills is behind the beloved brand.

Recently (2016ish) changes were made to the Totino’s Pizza Packaging and now they actually come in bags. That and the pizzas are now rectangular. There’s probably some market research or data out there that says the pizzas sell better being offered like that, but darn it, I liked my pizza round.

Nutritionally, it’s, it’s pizza:

Here’s some ingredients:

Looks like this pizza was locally grown, though, since it came out of a Minneapolis distribution center. Can’t complain about that.

Since I still didn’t know anyone who owned a toaster oven when this was done, it didn’t make it into one for cooking. The old oven took care of it:

It was an operation getting this out of the oven:

Try and ignore that there was a blatantly skipped try in there. That pizza didn’t move itself to the edge of the oven rack.

There was a rectangular cutting board on-hand that was used in-lieu of a plate for taking the pizza upstairs to review. Typically, I’d throw the whole pizza on one and cut it right there, but being that this Midnight Snack ‘za was a rectangle, yea you get it.

The Review

A big contribution that Rose Totino made to the recipe was perfecting a crust that would stay delicious and crispy after being prepared, frozen and then cooked. She did a good job of it. The crust on this was pretty tasty after being cooked for 16 minutes at 400 degrees. The tomato sauce and cheese tasted pretty fake, although for $2 this was essentially the McDonalds of frozen pizzas. The hamburger meat tasted good, it had some very mild spice and seemed about on par with what you’d get in a Taco Bell meal. I wasn’t a fan of the rectangular pizza since I wanted to throw it on a round plate and was stuck to a cutting board usually used for fruit. Probably could have just used a pizza pan and cut it on there, but what’s done is done. Plus, it looked like a letter N after I cut a triangle piece out, I can’t do the square pieces. Now that we’re past all the critical bits, these pizzas are really good for the price. There’s no reason that every college freezer shouldn’t have at least one of these in there.

Midnight Snack rating: 7.62/10

Recommend: Yep