'Food & Wine' Magazine Wimps Out with Its Taste Tests

Posted by Ed Levine, March 22, 2007 at 11:55 AM

Food & Wine is actually my guilty pleasure food glossy. I know it's style- and star-driven, but it's a very well put together magazine whose editors execute their vision very well. That said, the "Taste Tests" in the front of the book almost always wimp out.

I'm sure the reason is that they don't want to piss off any present or future advertisers, but the result for me is that I don't believe a word that's said in them. They tasted frozen pizzas in the April 2007 issue and reported on three, Amy's, American Flatbread, and Stouffer's French Bread Cheese Pizza.

In a shocking development, they liked them all. If you need further proof that Food & Wine wimps out on its taste tests, check out this 2002 Frozen Pizza Taste Test. Jeffrey Steingarten and I tasted many, many frozen pizzas for a chapter in my book Pizza: A Slice of Heaven, and the only one I would choose to eat is the American Flatbread cheese and herb pizza. They actually parbake those pizzas in a wood-burning oven. That's pretty cool for a frozen pizza.

1 Comment

Tags: American Flatbread, Amy's, Food and Wine, French bread pizza, frozen pizza, pizza, Stouffer's

1 Comment:

The problem Ed, is they are not testing the quality of Pizza that is frozen. You know as well as anyone else that you can take any decent pizza, freeze it, and then warm it up a few weeks later and it's 1000% better than anything sold as "Frozen Pizza".

What they are testing is the new food product labeled "Frozen Pizza", it's not "Pizza", it's "Frozen Pizza". Sure it sucks compared to Pizza, so they don't compare it to Pizza, they compare it to other crappy commercial "Frozen Pizza". Since they start with an assumption of terrible, anything that is not terrible is what they bother to mention.

If they say "Tasty sausage, and crisp crust", you must translate that into terrible frozen pizza sauce, terrible frozen pizza cheese, terrible crisp frozen pizza crust, with tasty sausage topping.

Corrected link for 2002 Frozen Pizza Taste Test
http://www.foodandwine.com/articles/taste-test-%7C-pizza

peekpoke at 4:15PM on 03/22/07

Add a comment:

Previewing your comment:

HTML Hints

Some HTML is OK: <a href="URL">link</a>, <strong>strong</strong>, <em>em</em>

Comment Guidelines

Post whatever you want, just keep it seriously about eats, seriously. We reserve the right to delete off-topic or inflammatory comments. Learn more at our Comment Policy page.

If you see something not so nice, please, report an inappropriate comment.