New product Wednesday: California Pizza Kitchen Pizza & Appetizer

by Teresa Gubbins

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Et tu, CPK?

Purchased at: Wal-mart at 1521 North Cockrell Hill Road, Dallas

In the category of "frozen pizza you buy at a supermarket," California Pizza Kitchen was always slightly better than competitors such as DiGiorno, Tombstone, or Totino's. True, it was owned by Kraft, but Kraft did a decent job executing the original CPK vision, offering the restaurant chain's most popular flavors like BBQ chicken, with a couple of crust options and topping varieties that were more interesting than the usual pepperoni and not weighed down with scads of cheese.

But in 2010, Kraft sold the frozen CPK line to Nestle (along with siblings such as DiGiorno). It is perhaps then that the decline began ... a decline embodied by California Pizza Kitchen Pizza & Appetizer, a new product that combines a frozen pizza with an appetizer.

Buying and consuming a frozen pizza is undoubtedly a lonely, beaten-down thing -- to have your entire dinner preparation consist of placing a frozen object into an oven for 8 to 11 minutes (or until cheese is melted and edges are golden brown) and then burning the roof of your mouth as you eat it. But as its own beaten-down thing, it has a certain purity, a certain awareness that yes, I am able to summon only the minimal amount of energy required to take care of sustenance -- one notch above opening a can of soup.

California Pizza Kitchen Pizza & Appetizer, on the other hand, embraces this brain-dead lifestyle with gusto. All of my food will come in a frozen box. And yet, as a brain-dead item, it is a semi-failure in that it requires multiple steps, which runs counter to the no-fuss mentality that eating a frozen pizza implies.

Many steps

There are three components: pizza, dip, and flatbread. The pizza takes more time than the dip and flatbread; apparently, 8 to 11 minutes is too long to wait for dinner, so this lets you fill that time by consuming a flatbread and dip. However, you will work for it: In addition to the three components, this involves two ovens, two timed segments, and more additional steps.

You put the pizza and the flatbread in the oven, then put the dip in the microwave, which you must then stir halfway through. After six minutes, you remove the flatbread. The pizza comes out in another six minutes; the supposition is that you will plow through flatbread-and-dip in six minutes.

The dip is a standard sticky green spinach artichoke with one or two artichoke heart nubs. The dip's list of ingredients starts out OK -- "spinach, cheese, water, sour cream, artichoke hearts" -- but then descends into yeast extracts, lactic acids, dextroses, and something called "chicken base."

Et tu, CPK

The dip's disposable black plastic dish wasn't exactly Wedgwood but it was company-ready enough. Logistically, it was awkward to poke at a four-inch-wide dish with pointy wedges of flatbread. On the good side, there was a little leftover dip, even despite the bountiful nine flatbread wedges -- pre-cut, since obviously anyone who would buy this kit is not allowed to handle a knife. Not wanting to waste, we scraped up the leftover dip later with slices of pizza.

The pizza was a thin-crust Sicilian topped with pepperoni and a whole bunch of other kibble-esque meat -- sausage, spicy ham, salami -- and not one, not two, but three cheeses, mozzarella, fontina, and Parmesan. Dip + pizza fed two people.

This isn't the only pizza-and-something-else combination product. In January, DiGiorno debuted Pizza & Wyngz as well as Pizza and Cookies. I just never expected to see this kind of thing coming from California Pizza Kitchen.

California Pizza Kitchen Pizza & Appetizer was $7.99.

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