#AD This post is in paid partnership with Dr. Oetker
I make a lot of food from scratch, and obviously homemade pizza is hard to beat when you’ve got the time to make the dough properly, let it prove and get your oven as hot as possible.
But I’m also a massive believer in convenience.
Sometimes it’s Friday night, you’ve had a long week and you don’t particularly fancy making dinner. You want something you can stick in the oven, open a beer and have on the table 15 minutes later.
And that’s where supermarket pizza comes in.
The choice has changed massively over the years. It’s no longer just a case of choosing between a cheap frozen pizza or ordering a takeaway. You can now spend quite a bit of money on premium fresh and frozen pizzas that promise something much closer to the restaurant experience.
So when Dr. Oetker asked me to put its Suprema range to the test, I thought I’d make it interesting.
Rather than trying one pizza on its own, I picked up three different salami pizzas and cooked them side by side.
I went for the Dr. Oetker Suprema La Romana Salami Sourdough Pizza, a Crosta & Mollica Stromboli Spicy Salami Pizza, and, to throw a fresh pizza into the mix, the PizzaExpress American Pizza.
Two frozen, one fresh.
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And I wanted to answer one pretty simple question:
Can you actually tell the difference?
More importantly, does buying a fresh pizza automatically mean you’re getting the better pizza?
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Let’s find out.
What I was looking for
I’m not going to start awarding points for how symmetrical the pepperoni is or measuring crusts with a ruler.
It’s pizza. It needs to taste good.
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But there are a few things that make a genuinely good pizza stand out.
For me, the base is probably the most important. I want a crust that’s crisp on the outside but still has some lightness and chew inside. Then you’ve got the tomato sauce, cheese, quality of the toppings and, most importantly, how everything works together.
I also think appearance matters.
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You eat with your eyes first, and when a pizza comes out of the oven with a puffed-up crust, bubbling cheese and toppings that actually look appetising, you’re already halfway there.
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So I compared all three on crust, toppings, flavour, appearance and overall quality.
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Pizza 1: Dr. Oetker Suprema La Romana
First up was the reason for the taste test, Dr. Oetker Suprema La Romana.
And there are a few things about this pizza that are quite different from what I’d normally associate with a frozen pizza.
The big one is the dough.
Suprema uses a sourdough base that’s triple-fermented over 24 hours, which has been developed to create a lighter, airier crust. The pizza is also baked at over 400°C on a hot stone during production, giving the crust that slightly blistered, Neapolitan-style appearance.
That’s quite a lot of attention being paid to something that’s ultimately going into your freezer.
And as a chef, that’s the bit that interested me.
You can put fantastic toppings on a pizza, but if the dough underneath them isn’t good, you’re fighting a losing battle.
The tomato element has had similar attention. Dr. Oetker Suprema uses a full-bodied passata made simply with sun-ripened Emilia-Romagna tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil and salt.
The La Romana is then topped with Spianata salami and mozzarella.
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Once cooked, the first thing I noticed was how even it looked. The crust had puffed up really nicely all the way around rather than having one huge section and then disappearing on the other side.
It had good colour, the toppings were nicely distributed and it genuinely looked like a premium pizza.
Cutting into it, the crust had a nice texture to it as well. There was some crispness on the outside but it still had that softer, airier texture through the middle that you want from this style of pizza.
Flavour-wise, I really liked it.
The Spianata salami was particularly good and had plenty of flavour without completely taking over everything else. The tomato, mozzarella and salami all felt nicely balanced, and nothing was fighting for attention.
Most importantly, the work that’s gone into the dough does actually translate when you eat it. It didn’t feel like a standard frozen pizza base with premium toppings thrown on top.
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Appearance: 9/10
Crust: 9/10
Toppings: 9/10
Flavour: 9/10
Overall: 9/10
Pizza 2: Crosta & Mollica Stromboli Spicy Salami
Next was the Crosta & Mollica Stromboli Spicy Salami Pizza.
I deliberately chose another high quality frozen pizza rather than putting the Suprema up against a really cheap alternative.
Otherwise, what’s the point?
If you’re genuinely trying to work out whether one pizza is better than another, they need to be playing roughly the same game.
And visually, this one probably made the biggest first impression.
The Crosta & Mollica Stromboli was my second frozen pizza in the taste test.
It’s definitely got that rustic look. The crust puffed up massively on one side, although interestingly the other side didn’t rise anywhere near as much.
You could call that uneven, or you could call it rustic. I’ll let you decide.
Either way, it looked really good when it came out of the oven.
And thankfully it tasted good too.
The spicy salami had plenty of flavour and overall this was a really enjoyable pizza. Of the three, this was probably the one that looked most like something you’d expect to be served in a restaurant when I first pulled it out of the oven.
The crust looked incredibly impressive, although interestingly I don’t think the flavour and texture of it quite lived up to how good it looked.
Where the Suprema pulled ahead for me was the overall eating experience. Its crust had risen more evenly, and I preferred the balance between the base and toppings.
There’s also the price to consider. The Suprema comes in cheaper than the Crosta & Mollica, but I certainly didn’t feel like I was compromising on quality. If anything, its consistency, flavour and texture gave it the edge for me.
Both were enjoyable pizzas, but taking taste, texture, consistency and price into account, I’d reach for the Suprema again.
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Appearance: 9/10
Crust: 8.5/10
Toppings: 8.5/10
Flavour: 9/10
Overall: 8.5/10
Pizza 3: PizzaExpress American
The third pizza was slightly different.
The PizzaExpress American comes from the chilled section rather than the freezer, and that’s exactly why I wanted it in the test.
I think there’s still an assumption that fresh automatically means better.
I’ve probably been guilty of thinking that myself.
You walk into a supermarket, see one pizza sitting in the fridge and another in the freezer and instinctively assume the chilled one is somehow closer to a freshly made restaurant pizza.
But is it?
The Pizza Express American gave me a fresh supermarket pizza to compare against the two frozen options.
Once cooked, the Pizza Express pizza looked good. The toppings were nicely distributed and, despite not looking particularly saucy at first, there was actually a decent amount of tomato sauce when you ate it.
I liked the topping-to-base ratio as well. You got a bit of everything in each bite and the overall flavour was good.
For me, though, the crust was where it fell behind the other two.
It wasn’t bad by any means, but it felt much more like what I’d think of as a standard supermarket pizza base. Next to the bigger, airier crusts on the two frozen pizzas, it just felt quite basic.
And that was probably the biggest surprise of this whole comparison.
The only fresh pizza of the three was actually the one that felt the most like a conventional supermarket pizza.
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Appearance: 7/10
Crust: 6.5/10
Toppings: 8/10
Flavour: 7.5/10
Overall: 7/10
Fresh vs frozen, does it actually matter?
Going into this, I expected the biggest difference to be between the fresh pizza and the two frozen ones.
It wasn’t necessarily that straightforward.
Freezing obviously makes something incredibly convenient. You can buy a pizza, keep it in the freezer and forget about it until the night when you can’t be bothered cooking.
Historically, the trade-off has been quality.
But after trying these three together, I don’t think fresh versus frozen is actually the most useful way of judging them anymore.
The two frozen pizzas were comfortably my top two.
Both had much more impressive crusts than the fresh Pizza Express pizza, and both felt closer to the premium, restaurant-inspired style that supermarket pizzas are increasingly aiming for.
For me, the question isn’t really whether a pizza has come from the fridge or the freezer.
It’s simply:
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How good is the pizza when it comes out of my oven?
That’s the bit I’m eating.
How did the three pizzas compare?
Once I’d cooked and tasted all three, here’s how I’d sum them up.
| Â | Dr. Oetker Suprema La Romana | Crosta & Mollica Stromboli | PizzaExpress American |
Type | Frozen | Frozen | Fresh |
Appearance | 9/10 | 9/10 | 7/10 |
Crust | 9/10 | 8.5/10 | 6.5/10 |
Toppings | 9/10 | 8.5/10 | 8/10 |
Flavour | 9/10 | 9/10 | 7.5/10 |
Overall | 9/10 | 8.5/10 | 7/10 |
The important thing for me is that all three have their strengths.
The Pizza Express had a good toppings ratio and was actually much saucier than it first appeared.
Crosta & Mollica looked brilliant and tasted really good too. It was comfortably ahead of the PizzaExpress for me and pushed the Suprema very close.
But the Dr. Oetker Suprema was the most consistent across everything I was judging. I liked the salami, I liked the balance of the toppings and I thought the crust was particularly good.
Which brings me to the winner.
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My winner
If I was standing in the supermarket choosing one of these to take home, I’d go for the Dr. Oetker Suprema La Romana.
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But it was close.
The Crosta & Mollica is a very good pizza and there wasn’t a huge amount separating the two. In fact, purely on that first visual impression when they came out of the oven, Crosta & Mollica probably had the edge.
But pizza isn’t just about how it looks.
The Suprema had a more even crust and, importantly, I thought the crust ate better than it looked. It had a nice lightness to it and worked really well with the toppings.
I also really liked the salami. It tasted like a good-quality ingredient and helped give the whole pizza that slightly more premium feel.
For me, it was just the most complete of the three.
Not by a mile. But enough to win.
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Has frozen pizza got better?
That’s probably the thing I’ve taken away from doing this more than anything.
Frozen pizza has come a long way.
I still think there’s a perception that buying fresh from the chilled aisle is the more premium option and going to the freezer is choosing convenience instead.
I’m not sure that’s necessarily true anymore.
If manufacturers are paying attention to the fermentation of the dough, how it’s baked, where the tomatoes come from and the quality of the toppings, then freezing is really just how that pizza gets from them to your oven.
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Dr. Oetker describes Suprema as a premium Neapolitan-style pizza designed to give you more of that restaurant-style experience at home.
After putting it alongside both another premium frozen pizza and a fresh supermarket pizza, I can understand what they’re going for.
It’s still a supermarket pizza.
I’m not going to tell you that taking something out of the freezer is identical to sitting in Naples watching someone pull a pizza from a wood-fired oven. That would be ridiculous.
But that’s not really the point.
For something you can keep in the freezer, cook at home and have ready when you fancy a pizza, I was genuinely impressed with the quality.
And for me, that’s exactly where Suprema fits.
It’s the pizza you keep in the freezer for a proper Friday night treat – something indulgent, satisfying and worth staying in for.
No dough making. No takeaway delivery fee. No washing up half the kitchen.
That’s a pretty decent argument for keeping one in the freezer.
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Where can you buy Dr. Oetker Suprema?
The Dr. Oetker Suprema range is available in Tesco, Asda, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Iceland and Farmfoods. The range includes La Margherita, La Romana and La Funghi-Ricotta.
I tried the La Romana for this taste test, which is the salami and mozzarella version.
You can find out more about Dr. Oetker Suprema here:
https://www.oetker.co.uk/dr-oetker-suprema
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Final thoughts
I actually really enjoyed doing this because it’s not often you cook three supermarket pizzas at exactly the same time and properly compare them.
Normally you eat one and think, yeah, that’s decent, without having anything next to it for reference.
Putting a fresh pizza and two premium frozen pizzas side by side made the differences much easier to spot.
The biggest surprise for me was probably that the fresh pizza didn’t come out on top.
My favourite was the Dr. Oetker Suprema La Romana, although the Crosta & Mollica wasn’t far behind.
For me, the Suprema was just that little bit more consistent. The crust was evenly risen and had a good texture, the salami was really nice and the whole thing felt balanced and premium.
More than anything, though, it’s changed my perception slightly of what a frozen pizza can be.
And if you’re looking for something to keep in the freezer for your next pizza night, Dr. Oetker Suprema is definitely worth trying.https://www.oetker.co.uk/dr-oetker-suprema
