DiGiorno's all-onion March Madness 'Cry Pie' pizza is better than it has any right being
DiGiorno's special college basketball pizza reeks, but onions and alfredo sauce should be best friends.
NCAA basketball tournament season is a time for gimmicky experimentation for all the #brands out there. Two weeks ago we were treated to the danky grossness of the Coors-sicle, a frozen beer-adjacent … confection? that smelled like weed and tasted like a can of Arizona iced tea had been taught to vomit.
This, somehow, led DiGiorno to reach out to Caroline Darney and I in hopes of reviewing the company’s new, March Madness-specific pizza. The Cry Pie is a thin crust square topped with alfredo sauce, a light amount of cheese and then what I can only estimate is half a pound of onions.
Red onions. Caramelized onions. Scallions.
Seriously, this thing smelled the minute I brought it out of the freezer. Frozen things shouldn’t smell and yet, here we are.
Just checking on it by cracking the oven door unleashed a torrent of onion smell that will linger on in my kitchen even after I flood it with Febreze. My dogs, two animals I have seen eat (and then vomit) rocks, investigated the source and ran to higher ground. Friends, this pizza reeks.
But the taste? Well, the taste is pretty damn good.
DiGiorno saw @cwdarney and i trash the stupid Coors popsicles and thought "what if we sent them a pizza that's 40 percent onions?" and somehow it's way better than either of us expected pic.twitter.com/kwAHApxZ91
— Christian D'Andrea (@TrainIsland) March 31, 2023
The acidic tang of the onions — ALL THE ONIONS — plays great with the creamy base of the alfredo sauce. The crust, which is always a concern with frozen pizzas but especially with a thin crust and the liquid-heavy content of vegetables on top, came out perfectly crisp. The raised edges kept the cheese from spilling to the bottom of my oven and had a real Pillsbury Crescent Rolls vibe to it.
While a little garlic would have been a nice touch (and destroyed my breath for possibly weeks afterward) this is a pretty solid, if basic, pizza. Some hot sauce upped the acidic tang a little and really worked out well. You can’t tell from the video above (thanks to my extremely professional editing) but I gruffled down three slices in the six-ish minutes we were filming.
It’s good! I gave the Cry Pie an eight out of 10, which means something since I live in Wisconsin where our frozen pizza grocery selection is so vast it goes viral every now and then. Caroline was more reserved at a six of 10, which is still way better than that Coors nonsense from the start of the tournament. Both of us only slightly regretted the Superfund burps that quickly accompanied digestion.
Anyway, I don’t know if DiGiorno’s gonna dive into all-onion pizzas from here on out. I’m just saying I’ll give it a try if they do.