Iceland Rising Dough Double Pepperoni Pizza

Call me cynical, but when it comes to shop-bought pizzas, I rarely believe the claims of the packaging beyond the description of the topping, and even that's often subject to some lively internal debate.

So when Iceland present me with a new pizza option - this so-called 'Rising Dough' product, with a photograph on the box which depicts something not dissimilar in appearance to any other Iceland pizza - I'm naturally going to be a little sceptical...

...and yet...

This is probably not the most effective photograph for demonstrating exactly how much this dough rose, but let me be clear:

This dough really rises. A lot.

Naturally, due to the vagaries of dough manufacture and cooking by fan assisted convection, to say it doesn't rise evenly would be a massive understatement. On the left of the photo, you may be able to discern a particularly mountainous region from which the toppings have toppled. Before the pizza went into the oven (straight from the freezer, for a mere 20-ish minutes), the toppings were fairly evenly distributed. Such was no longer the case when cooking had finished... in fact, it looked very much as though some of the toppings had simply disappeared. Obviously 2 different kinds of pepperoni don't just evaporate in the oven, so they've just collected into the troughs of the pizza.

What's rather impressive about this rising dough - aside from the extent to which it rises - is that it doesn't rise by creating massive bubbles. So... it rises unevenly without, yet evenly within. Just the kind of weirdness I like in my food. Or something. The base is, perhaps, a little excessive for my preference (very much a thin'n'crispy kinda guy), but the flavour is better than a lot of other shop-bought pizzas I've tried (and I've tried a lot).

In other respects, this is a pretty typical shop-bought pizza - scant cheese scattered unevenly, a stingy smear of tomato purée, greasy pepperoni that makes the experience of eating it slightly more acidic than it need be... weirdly, though, I didn't get that scuffing on the roof of my mouth that I usually get when I have a pepperoni pizza (seriously, folks, is that just me, or is it a common phenomenon?).

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised - yet another Iceland product for which my expectations were low, which turned out to actually be rather good... and all this for a mere £2. That may well be slightly more expensive than some of their other own-brand products, and largely for the sake of a gimmick, but it certainly makes a change from the usual soggy, slimy things that come out of cardboard boxes.