Sunday Times Food Awards 2018

Which supermarkets make the most delicious ready-to-bake pizza?

In a quest to help you buy the best, we put 12 pizzas from top SA retailers to the taste test

29 April 2018 - 00:01 By Hilary Biller

HOW WE CONDUCTED OUR TASTE TEST

It's free and fair!

We know that taste is a subjective thing, but when you gather a group of pizza lovers together for a blind tasting, you're bound to get an idea of which ready-to-bake supermarket pizzas are the best buy.

For a fair comparison, like needs to be judged with like and as retailers stock a wide range of different pizzas, we opted not to do a competitive tasting. Instead we selected 12 popular types of pizza from four different retailers. We asked our taste testers to rate each pizza out of 10, judging the appearance, taste, base and topping, as well as to say whether they would buy that product.

Each pizza was prepared exactly as per package instructions by a group of chefs at HTA cooking school in Randburg, Joburg, sliced and served to the tasters without any packaging or branding. In many samples the heating instructions weren’t sufficient to give a good crispy base and could have done with extra baking.

To ensure we had professional input, we asked two chefs to join the panel: Chef Heinz Brunner, previous vice president of the South African Chefs Association and a great lover of this Italian original, and Chef Mkhacani Richard Baloyi, pizza expert and owner of La Mama’s Pizzeria in Randburg.