Value for money: Fresh pizza

This week, PriceWatchcompares four varieties of fresh pizza

MILANO ORIGINAL MARGHERITA

€2.50 FOR 249G, €10.04 PER KG

WE BOUGHT this while it was half-price in our local Tesco which made it much better value than it would have been at full price. It is not a particularly flash pizza but it is fresh and tastes absolutely fine. The topping, made with 26 per cent tangy tomato sauce and 20 per cent quality mozzarella, has a nice zing to it while the very thin base crisps up beautifully. It is a bit on the small side and left us a little hungry. The mozzarella cubes created little pools of cheese rather than giving full coverage.

VERDICT: Fresh and tasty

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PRIMAFRESCO MARGHERITA PIZZA

€4 for411G, €9.73 per kg

THIS IS comparatively cheap and looks appetising straight out of the oven. It is made with lots of fresh tomatoes on the topping and a blend of mozzarella, mild white cheese and mature cheddar – although the cheddar flavours disappeared into the background on the pizza we tasted. There is a lot of dough on the base and this made the whole thing just a little too chewy for us. While it looks and smells great it never quite delivered on its promise and left us feeling just a little disappointed.

VERDICT: Too doughy

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M&S ITALIAN STYLE MARGHERITA PIZZA

€6 for 400g, €15 per kg

THIS LOOKS the poshest and is miles ahead in terms of taste and texture. While the other contenders in the PriceWatchpizza Olympics had to make do with ordinary tomatoes, vegetable oil, cheddar and ordinary mozzarella, this is all about the sun-blush cherry tomatoes, olive oil, provolone and stringy mozzarella. The base is lovely and crisp, the topping rich and tomatoey with a gorgeous herb flavour. There isn't a lot of topping around the edges so it gets a little crunchy and it isn't cheap.

VERDICT: Top notch

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TESCO VALUE  CHEESE & TOMATO PIZZA

€1.20 for 480g, €2.50 per kg

WHILE THIS is cheap and there is a whole lot of it, we still don’t think it’s worth spending any money on at all. And the reason? Tesco has managed to create a product that looks like a pizza but tastes of virtually nothing so seconds after eating a slice we’d no memory of what it tasted like although we do seem to remember that the dough had a vague cardboard flavour. The label tells us that there is 16 per cent tomato puree, 12 per cent mozzarella and 8 per cent cheddar but, by the time it came out of our oven, the topping had all but disappeared.

VERDICT: Utterly tasteless

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