Trader Joe’s Meatless Italian Style Sausage and Cheese Flatbread Pizza. Ok, I put the Pizza in there as part of the name because you know what, this is a pizza! I see this trend around me all the time. We want to be more upscale, so the name pizza is to the pedestrian for us so now it’s Flatbread. Don’t be fooled because this is all pizza!
Then there is the other trend that Trader Joe’s is foisting on us, the meatless fake meat trend. Do we need any more of it? There are so many good options for vegetarian pizzas why fake it? Vegetarians get enough protein from the cheese that the addition of meatless meat just seems forced.
As I always say, the proof is in the pudding (or at least the pizza, I mean, flatbread) Again with most of these smaller pizzas. It is too much for one person to eat but not enough for two people to share without a side dish unless you are tiny, tiny. A serving size is 1/2 a pizza but that’s only 320 calories. Normally, I would just eat the whole thing for a meal.
I cranked up the oven and put it in after it heated up. Needs to be bake for about 15 minutes. Just looking at it you can’t tell that the fake meat is not soy protein. Looks like a decent amount of veggies sprinkled on top to give it some interesting flavors. Looks like a decent amount of cheese too. While it’s baking it smells like pizza, so things are looking up. BTW, I have zero confidence that this pizza is going to be edible, but I do these things for my loyal readers…
I pulled the pizza out of the oven and it looks just like a Red Barron or DiGiorno’s. You can hardly tell the difference between this and any other frozen pizza you get from the grocery store, except for our little secret which is the fake meat thing. I suppose if you hid the box you could get your kids to eat it and they would be none the wiser. I took a couple of bites and it actually tasted pretty darn good. It smells great. The crust is rather thin and cracker-like. But there is a decent amount of toppings and cheese to fill you up. I could only eat 3 out of the four pieces. Now the downer, I was curious how the fake sausage tasted on its own because I couldn’t really taste anything when I ate the pizza and I could pick up some mild sausage seasonings flavors. I plucked a fake piece of sausage from the top and popped it in my mouth. Nothing. Hmmm…. cardboard? I thought maybe I got a bad piece. Tried it again. Same thing, Cardboard. I expected nuggets of flavor, not cardboard. Fortunately, it didn’t seem to degrade the overall experience. I wished they had just left the faux sausage off at this point though…
Hopefully, this trend doesn’t continue with Trader Joe’s. I can see a meatless, soy cheese, gluten-free flatbread pizza. Yuck! If I take the pizza as a whole, I would give it 7 bells. It was good, but nothing I can’t get up at the local grocery store. I would get the fake sausage like 2 Bells if it was a product in its own right, but its blandness doesn’t distract from the flavor of the pizza as a whole. If you are vegetarian and don’t mind fake meat, give this pizza a whirl!
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