Thaw
Does it defrost to the state the instructions promise, in the time they claim?
Method
How we test
Published in full, before the results, so you can decide whether our verdicts are worth anything.
Controls
- Every dough is bought at retail price, by us, as an ordinary customer. No press samples.
- Boxes are opened and photographed on arrival, before anything is defrosted, and the packaging condition is recorded.
- Doughs are brought to the same temperature by the same route: overnight in the fridge, then to room temperature for the time the seller specifies.
- The same bench, the same semolina for dusting, the same hands stretching.
- The same margherita on every base: identical tomato, identical mozzarella, weighed, so the topping never flatters one dough over another.
- Two bakes each — one in a domestic oven at its maximum, one in a pizza oven at 450°C — because most people own the first and want to know if the dough survives it.
- Every ball in the pack gets used. Consistency across a box is part of the product.
What we score
Stretch
Opens to 12 inches without tearing, snapping back, or leaving a thick collar.
Oven spring
How much rim it throws in the first ninety seconds.
Crumb
Open and irregular, or tight and bready.
Char
Whether it leopards at 450°C, and whether it colours at all at 250°C.
Taste
Salt, ferment, wheat. Blind, against a control dough we make ourselves.
Consistency
Ball to ball across the box. One good pizza is luck.
Condition on arrival
Still frozen? Still sealed? Still the right shape?
Cost per pizza
Delivered, not headline. The number the seller does not print.
Scores are not published until a dough has been baked twice. Until then its record carries the specification and nothing else. An empty verdict column is honest; a filled-in one that nobody earned is not.