Has something happened to pizzas?

Merkavar

I am in australia but maybe this is a global thing, or maybe it is just in my head.

A few years ago I used to eat pizzas and they were around 5000kj or 1100 calories

But now when I look at pizzas everything seems to be 7000kj even 8000kj

Has something changed or maybe I am misremembering or not comparing apples to apples.

yirara

Do you mean pizzas in restaurants or deepfreeze pizzas? I do notice something about frozen pizza: in the past I could get a whole frozen pizza at around 650kcal. Now it's impossible to get anything tasty below 780 or so. And that's the lower end. Not in AUS though.

sollyn23l2

They've most likely added more cheese. Non-calorie counting people used to complain en mass that frozen pizza never had enough cheese.

TracyL963

My guess is the crust is different. Higher fat, thicker crust is going to be more calories. I can't find a "rising" crust in my calorie range. Rising crusts are popular in the U.S. But, I always look for thin crust instead.

Another option, buy cheese only and add your own pepperoni. If you get turkey pepperoni (or chicken sausage) in your area, that will save you many calories. Because turkey pepperoni is low-fat it's kind of stiff. I usually cut pepperoni slices into quarters and use it on pizza. Hormel (U.S. brand) makes a good one.

mtaratoot

How big are these pizzas?

I figure a basic slice of pizza is over 300 calories. It could be well over depending how many toppings or what kind of toppings. Maybe the nutrition label just changed the serving size?

Where are you getting the calorie information?

Hobartlemagne

+1 on crust variation. There are huge differences in thickness between different types of crust.
However- cheese use has inflated in recent decades

AnnPT77

TracyL963 wrote: »

My guess is the crust is different. Higher fat, thicker crust is going to be more calories. I can't find a "rising" crust in my calorie range. Rising crusts are popular in the U.S. But, I always look for thin crust instead.

Another option, buy cheese only and add your own pepperoni. If you get turkey pepperoni (or chicken sausage) in your area, that will save you many calories. Because turkey pepperoni is low-fat it's kind of stiff. I usually cut pepperoni slices into quarters and use it on pizza. Hormel (U.S. brand) makes a good one.

Pizza dough usually contains minimal amounts of added fats, sometimes no added fats. That's generally true for thin or thick crusts. I know that's not your main point: For sure, very likely thick crust pizza of the same inch size will be higher calorie because there's simply more crust, and thicker crusts seem to be more popular than they used to be. Some of the thickness is about rising (bubbles, loosely), some is about more volume of dough per piece. The latter adds calories, of course.

Also, it's a trend around here to use high-calorie drizzles on pizza: Olive oil, truffle oil, hot honey, and that sort of thing, just poured on top of the pizza. That adds a bunch of calories really fast.

And of course the cheese: Soooo muccchhhh cheeeeeese!