Trader Joe’s Pizza Parlanno Review

Trader Joes Pizza Parlanno

Anyone who knows me knows I am a nut about pizza! My kids can wolf down pepperoni pizza like nobody’s business and I know when I want them to eat a big meal, all I have to do is get some pepperoni pizza I know I’m set for the meal.

I’ve been super interested in pizza making for many years and I usually make my own dough from scratch and bake it in my oven on a granite pizza stone. I have dreams of building a wood fired pizza oven in the back yard but I really need to get off my butt and do it some summer. I have used Trader Joe’s fresh dough many times and I’ll write a review on that in the future, but in short, I like them and they make great pizzas, but there are some tricks to working with their fresh dough. 

Trader Joes Pizza Parlanno Cut

I’m not sure when I first had pizza, but one of my earliest memories of eating pizza was on a trip through Europe in the early 1970s with the whole family and we were in the little mountain village in Switzerland called Zermatt. There is fairly heavy Italian influence there and we were out at a restaurant one night and they had a wood fired oven in there and they were making pizzas. All of us kids thought it was the coolest thing to see them putting pizzas in this fireplace like thing. I remember seeing the pizza bubble up and get those nicely baked bubbles on the edges. Yummy!

Fast forward many years and now I’m making pizza from scratch once or twice a week here at Club Trader Joe’s. When I don’t make it I have a pile of frozen pizzas in the freezer from Trader’s. I love them all, for the most part, but the one I go to that I like the most is the Pizza Parlanno (Trader Giotto’s) because it reminds me of the old days. In the 1980’s we ate a lot of Celeste pizza. I don’t know if I’ve seen it around here recently, but my mother would buy these by the cart full. I loved the Celeste Suprema and it had everything on it. This Pizza Parlanno reminds me of that type of pizza but just ever so better than that.

Trader’s is obviously trying to compete with the Celeste and Red Baron’s of the frozen pizza world with this pizza and I think they do a great job (for frozen pizza). This is the kitchen sink pizza. It’s got pepperoni and sausage. Onions, Red and yellow bell peppers. It’s all on a thin, cracker like crust that has a really nice crunch when you bite into it. There is a fair amount of sauce and cheese and it all seems to work together. They are pretty simple to make, pull them out of box and put them right on the wire rack in the oven. That makes sure the crust is very crunchy. Something I don’t strive for in my own pizzas, but from store bought it ain’t half bad.

You have to remember that this isn’t anything near a real pizzeria style pizza, but something you can have a quick meal or something to feed the kids in a hurry. There isn’t a lot of pizza here so you would need 2-3 of them to feed a growing family like mine.

I really like this Pizza Parlanno and rate it 7 bells!