Big Americans Pizzas, or Further Adventures in Grocery Shopping

I have to go grocery shopping on a nearly-daily basis because, as I might have mentioned in passing, we STILL do not have our car, and I keep checking but we still have a very very small refrigerator and freezer. To make the experience more entertaining, I try to notice new details about the stock each time I shop. So I was exercising my observational skills while perusing the contents of Albert Heijn's freezer section, and darned if there wasn't blog fodder there staring me right in the face. Dr. Oetker's Big Americans Pizza.

I have been a lifelong consumer of pizza, mostly in America. I have eaten more pizzas - delivered, frozen, and homemade - than I would even attempt to count. Also, my BMI, qualifies me as an authentic Big American. I suspect many Americans got to be Big Americans by eating too much pizza, but that is neither here nor there. As a Big American, I can with some authority pronounce Dr. Oetker's Big Americans Pizza to be neither big nor American. Here is my supporting evidence:

(1) A small pizza in the U.S. is 10" or 12". A large is 14-16", and sometimes there is even extra-large, which, not surprisingly, can be bigger than that. If you were to put a Dr. Oetker's Big Americans Pizza in the oven, take it out when it was nice and warm, and stretch it as far as you could without breaking it, it would still not make it to even 10". Ix-nay on the ig-bay.

(2) Dr. Oetker's Big Americans Pizzas include ingredients that I have never seen on a pizza, or on any list of pizza toppings, in the Lower 48, including tuna (the Big Americans California), corn (the Big Americans Supreme and the Big Americans BBQ chicken), and - I think I might've seen this somewhere in the U.S. but it's hardly typical - marinated BBQ chicken (the Big Americans BBQ Chicken).

(3) Dr. Oetker wouldn't know authentic pepperoni if it rolled off the sidewalk and tripped him off his bicycle.

I couldn't help myself; I had to go check out Dr. Oetker's pizza website (http://www.oetker.nl/oetker_nl/html/default/debi-5dmg7r.nl.html). And here is what I learned. "Big Americans are pizzas with an extra thick crust. Crispy on the outside, light on the inside, and richly topped with thoughtfully selected ingredients and extra real cheese." Nevermind that the cheese is not among the varieties used on pizzas in America (e.g., emmenthaler).

Not knowing when to stop, I clicked on the "FAQs" link. The questions included, "Are there vegetarian pizzas?" (answer: yes. But none of them are members of the Big Americans line), and "My freezer is too full; can I store my pizza in the refrigerator (now there's someone I can relate to, but the answer was, sadly, "no."). Other piercingly shrewd questions were: "can I bake my pizza in the microwave?"; "Why is there baking paper under Casa di Mama's pizzas?"; "Why must Casa di Mama's pizzas be baked at 250 when the other pizzas are baked at a much lower temperature?"; and the Casa di Mama crust is still slack; how can this be?" 

After I've had some time to ponder the above and other pizza-related conundrums, I'm sure I'll be back to report further adventures in grocery shopping. Check back in, oh, early 2011.