Is Aldi's Bloody Mary Pizza Weirdly Good Or Just Plain Weird

Welcome back to the Aldi Aisle of Shame column, where Daily Meal's Aldi superfans try out the most attention-grabbing new Find of the week to let you know if it's worth seeking out.

 While the Aisle of Shame does have a physical location in each store, out of necessity it also overlaps into other areas, such as the frozen food section. It's there where I discovered this week's impulse buy: the Mama Cozzi's supreme bloody mary style pizza. When I saw it in the case, I was intrigued, because I hadn't seen this particular type of pizza before. Booze-flavored items are pretty on-brand for Aldi, however, since the chain has offered everything from tequila ghost pepper salami to margarita-flavored tortilla chips to Moscow Mule kettle chips.

The toppings also piqued my interest — why would a bloody mary pizza have either chicken or bacon? Well, maybe in Wisconsin; one of the state's most outrageous offerings is a drink called the Bloody Beast that is topped with a whole fried chicken along with bacon and various other meat products. As Aldi's pizza version of the classic cocktail doesn't have a Wisconsin connection, though, this seems a bit of a stretch.

The pizza also features caramelized onions and black olives, neither of which seem particularly bloody mary-ish. This leaves the so-called bloody mary-style sauce to do a lot of heavy lifting. What would make it taste different from regular tomato sauce? Horseradish would probably do the trick, but it was absent from the ingredients list. I was skeptical but thought the pizza worth trying.

The pizza baked up perfectly in 15 minutes, and just for fun, I sliced it into tavern-style squares. My son came into the kitchen as I was getting ready to taste test, so he helped. As I feared, there was no horseradish flavor, and the bloody mary-style sauce was fairly bland. There also wasn't enough of it, which is a common frozen pizza failing.

My son mostly noticed the chicken chunks, which were nicely seasoned, if sparse, but neither of us could detect the bacon or onions, and the black olives were just kind of there. We both liked the crust, though, since it was very thin and crispy. It was kind of like a buffalo chicken pizza minus the buffalo sauce, but there was one mystery flavor neither of us could identify. I turned back to the box, and there it was: "garnished with celery." The celery isn't visible, but the taste is noticeable once you know what you're looking for, and not in a good way.

The verdict? Mama Cozzi's supreme bloody mary is a decent chicken pizza, although nothing about it screamed bloody mary. Ironically, the one element that at least whispered the words — the celery — is something I really don't care for. Would I buy it again? No. Trying this pizza did, however, remind me to keep an eye out for Mama Cozzi's buffalo chicken pizza if this former flavor ever comes back around.