DiGiorno Ultimate Pizza. Four Cheese, Pepperoni, Four Meat and Supreme. $6.99 per 22.9- to 26.4-ounce frozen pizza.
Bonnie: Kraft's original DiGiorno pizza rivaled takeout with its rising crust. Recently, though, the company has abandoned the rising-crust technology in favor of gimmicks like this new "ultimate" pizza — one with a "pizzeria-style crust" with purported higher-quality toppings, including a variety of imported cheeses and meats that I've seen on other frozen pizzas.
Nutritionally, a small serving of one-fifth of a 10-inch pie contains from 320 to 370 calories, 14 to 19 grams of total fat (of which 7 to 8 grams are saturated), and 880 to 1,120 milligrams of sodium. In other words, these are ultimate all right — but in calories, fat and sodium rather than ingredients.
If you decide to indulge, try to keep it to one piece, and complete your meal with a lightly dressed salad.
Carolyn: Frozen pizza has usurped pasta sauce as the food category with the steadiest and heaviest stream of new products. The downside is the way these new products squeeze out old favorites like DiGiorno's original and still unbeatable rising-crust pizza. This latest DiGiorno concept — pizzas with large quantities of big pieces of premium ingredient-toppings dubbed Ultimates — is most evident in the Supreme and Four Meat varieties. These aren't just delicious but also so filling that a single medium-size pie and salad could easily feed a family of four or five. The crusts aren't the best, but they're also not center-stage.
The Four Cheese and Pepperoni Ultimates aren't that different from regular DiGiorno Four Cheese and Pepperoni, and the regular's rising-crust version is better.
Pillsbury Simply Bake Bars. Peanut Butter Chocolate Chunk, and Turtle Supreme. $3.49 per 12-ounce refrigerated package.
Bonnie: Pillsbury's new dessert bars make baking simple. Just heat the oven, remove the plastic cover, place the dough-filled plastic container on a baking sheet and cook 20 minutes. Unfortunately, this isn't a case of the end product being as good as the time and effort put into it. The Simply Bake results don't taste anywhere near as good as the rich gooey bars pictured on the box. That's probably because of all the chemicals used to preserve the premade dough.
These are also not worth the 170 calories and 9 grams of fat found in a 1-by-2-inch bar. For quick baking with fewer chemicals, consider Nestle, or even one of Pillsbury's other ready-to-bake desserts (check the ingredients).
Carolyn: What could be more convenient than making baked goods from refrigerated dough? Making baked goods from refrigerated dough that comes in its own ready-to-bake pan.
Pillsbury may not win any environmental awards for Simply Bake, but these bars are as easy as bakery-made and are more convenient because there's no need to run out to a bakery. Just pick up one of these trays on your weekly shopping trip.
The quality is comparable to what you'd find in a bakery or coffee shop (to me, if not to Bonnie). Each bar is topped with tons of nuts and flavor chips, and each bakes to a pleasing crusty-at-the-edges, soft-in-the-middle consistency (without the chemical aftertaste of dough that comes from a tube). All this for a third to a quarter the cost of a coffee-shop bar cookie.
The excessively stern and illogical preheating instructions are the only downside, as they are as environmentally incorrect as the disposable pans (it says you MUST preheat your oven for 20 minutes, when mine was ready in 10).
Annie's Naturals Salad Dressings. Light Italian, and Organic Maple Ginger. $3.49 per 8-ounce bottle of Maple Ginger and $4.89 per 16-ounce bottle of Light Italian.
Bonnie: What you're usually paying for when you buy light dressings is the convenience of having someone else water-down a dressing for you. That's true of Annie's new Light Italian Dressing, but also, oddly, of her new regular Maple Ginger Dressing.
Annie's Light Italian is also way too heavy on the garlic. Top your salad with it only if you're planning on spending the evening alone or with another garlic lover! The Maple Ginger needs more of the ginger found in its name.
As for calories and fat, the Light Italian contains 60 calories and 6 grams of fat per 2 tablespoons, whereas the Maple Ginger has 100 calories and 10 grams of fat, which is similar to other regular dressings. One bottled dressing that I recently tried that's much tastier is Oliv, which is made with extra-virgin olive oil and white balsamic vinegar.
Carolyn: With its quaint graphics and signature New England flavoring, Annie's Maple Ginger Dressing looks like one of those charming, sweet, expensive salad dressings you can pick up at any farm stand in Vermont. But what's going on in this bottle is way more complicated than anything you'll find in a traditional New England kitchen.
The maple here appears as a generic sweetener and only partly offsets the vinegar and mustard that are this dressing's real taste base. Both these ingredients are topped with a zing of ginger, giving it an Asian flavor. Annie could greatly cut down on potential customer disappointment and be lots more accurate if she called this Sweet 'n Sour Ginger.
The Light Italian is much more true to its name. Its strong and pleasant garlic flavor almost makes up for its vinegary lightness. Nevertheless, I won't be finishing my test bottle. Why? To be blunt, it has almost the exact tan color and watery consistency of vomit. I can't believe the folks at Annie's didn't notice this or think it would be a problem.
Bonnie Tandy Leblang is a registered dietitian and professional speaker. Carolyn Wyman is a junk-food fanatic and author of "Better Than Homemade: Amazing Foods That Changed the Way We Eat" (Quirk). Each week they critique three new food items. For previous columns, visit www.supermarketsampler.com, and for more food info and chances to win free products, visit www.biteofthebest.com. © Universal Press Syndicate