Totino's Pizza Roll Flavors, Ranked Worst To Best
If you're planning to have Totino's pizza rolls on the snack table at your next get-together, it's natural to feel stuck when you visit the freezer aisle. There are 10 flavors to pick from, after all, ranging from traditional toppings like pepperoni to take-out foods you might not expect in a pizza roll, such as orange chicken. Totino's also sells three types of breakfast snack bites that share a similar format to pizza rolls. These products are not included in this review because they are not identified as being "pizza rolls."
The rolls come in four package sizes, starting with the smallest, which contains 15 pieces, or 2.5 servings for about $2.50. A bag of 50 provides eight servings for around $6 and a large bag with 100 has 16 servings for $11.50. Finally, you can get 21 servings in a jumbo bag of 130 rolls for around $13.50. The prices were the same for every variety and mostly consistent across the grocery stores I visited (Kroger, Meijer, and Walmart). Additionally, these prices are accurate as of publication and based on my location, but will vary by region and over time.
My main criteria while ranking Totino's products were taste, texture, and ingredients. If you'd like to know more about the taste-testing process, take a gander at the methodology section at the end of the article.
Read more: Frozen Pizzas, Ranked From Worst To Best
10. Buffalo Style Chicken Pizza Rolls
Totino's Buffalo Style Chicken Pizza Rolls have a distinctive flavor, but not in a good way. Bite into one of these and a spicy, sour flavor will attack your tongue. That seasoning is pleasant on wings, but it tastes artificial and jarring in a pizza roll. Recipes for Buffalo-style wings usually call for Frank's RedHot sauce. If you look at the back of the Totino's package, you'll see the hot sauce is made with cayenne peppers aged in vinegar, which should be roughly equivalent to Frank's. That leaves us with no explanation as to why it tastes so much worse, but it just does.
Aesthetically, these pizza rolls won't win any prizes either. If you look at the package, you'll see a pizza roll artfully cut open by food photographers. Sauce, bits of cheese, and chicken are bursting out. Cutting one open in real life results in a completely different experience. During the baking process, some of the filling almost always oozes out of the sides, making the final roll emptier than it should be. Then, your knife work will reveal some reddish-orange goo with about two spots of white cheese inside. If you only go by the texture in your mouth, it all just feels like uniform paste.
Instead of putting out a tray of Buffalo Style Chicken Pizza Rolls for game night, revisit your options. You might prefer a different type of pizza roll, or some wings with actual meat on them.
9. Orange Chicken Pizza Rolls
The taste and texture of Totino's Orange Chicken Pizza Rolls is subpar. Pizza rolls are fun and orange chicken is delicious, so combining them should be a win, but the result is not. The texture is a big part of what makes orange chicken so appealing -- tender chicken covered in crispy breading drenched in a sticky sweet and spicy sauce. Eating these pizza rolls is a less pleasant sensation. Orange flavored filling oozes out when you bite through the chewy, salty, dough. The chunks of chicken in the marketing photo are difficult to detect when this snack is actually in your mouth. Instead, the filling is uniform with a chewy and gooey texture and an orangey flavor. It doesn't tick all the boxes the way the original dish does.
These pizza rolls (as well as the Buffalo-style) come in FaZe Clan packaging. Totino's has partnered with the self-proclaimed, "World's most subscribed gaming team," in other words, a YouTube channel dedicated to making content about video games. Indeed, pizza rolls are easy to prepare and eat if you're enthralled by a Fortnite tournament, so it's logical the group would put its name on the bag. Stuffing pizza rolls in your mouth while grabbing a controller seems much easier than trying to keep playing while using chopsticks and holding a take-out container. Even so, you'll likely prefer the taste of more traditional Totino's Pizza Rolls and keep the orange chicken flavor for actual orange chicken.
8. Pepperoni & Bacon Pizza Rolls
The best thing about Totino's Pepperoni & Bacon Pizza Rolls is that they taste like bacon. Many other pizza roll flavors are so similar it's hard to tell them apart. If you make several different kinds of rolls and mix them all together on a tray, you can still pick out which ones are bacon and pepperoni. Unfortunately, the worst thing about them is also the bacon flavor -- it just doesn't fulfill expectations. These could be smokier with little bits of crisp bacon and spicy pepperoni encased in melted cheese. That's just wishful thinking, though.
Like Totino's other pizza rolls, the texture is chewy on the outside and gooey on the inside. The filling is also far more saucy and tomatoey than cheesy. A quick perusal of the ingredients reveals that the pepperoni isn't pepperoni, but rather pepperoni seasoned pork. The bacon pieces are cubes of ground pork shoulder, but finding a significant chunk in the rolls is like finding a needle in a haystack -- and it certainly isn't crisp.
7. Triple Pepperoni Pizza Rolls
Pepperoni lovers may feel the urge to buy Totino's Triple Pepperoni Pizza Rolls, but the taste and amount of pepperoni will likely disappoint. Triple is a big promise to keep. It brings to mind a stack of crispy pepperoni rolled up in a soft crust with melty mozzarella, but that does not describe this product. These pizza rolls have a gooey orange filling and little cubes of pepperoni on the inside.
If you compare triple pepperoni flavor to normal pepperoni pizza rolls, there's not much difference except for the spice level, which is greater for triple pepperoni. When you look at the actual contents of the rolls, the naked eye will not detect three times as many chunks of pepperoni. If you had a plate with both triple pepperoni and normal pepperoni, you would be hard pressed to tell the difference by sight and taste alone.
If you're hosting a game night for people who love pepperoni, these pizza rolls probably wouldn't be as successful as a Hot-N-Ready Pepperoni Pizza from Little Caesars. Both provide about eight servings -- 50 pizza rolls in the bag and 8 slices in a box. At under $7, the pizza only costs about a dollar more than a $6 bag of Totino's Pizza Rolls. That's not much to upgrade to superior quality by purchasing a freshly-made pizza instead of frozen pizza rolls.
6. Triple Cheese Pizza Rolls
Triple cheese, like triple pepperoni, are not words to be spoken lightly, yet Totino's has thrown them about as if they were worthless. The company's Triple Cheese Pizza Rolls are about the least cheesy thing you could find on the planet. You'll only see two lumps of cheese in the photo of the filling, and it doesn't taste cheesy either. Worse, if you read the ingredients on the packaging, you will discover these contain mostly "imitation mozzarella cheese" and less than 2% rehydrated mozzarella cheese. That doesn't sound like triple cheese and the taste suffers as a result.
When you bite into cheese pizza roll, molten cheese should come bubbling out. When you try to tear a bit away with your teeth, there should be strings of melty cheese hanging down, just as there are with any respectable pizza. Totino's has not provided this experience and it seems like the only way to have it would be to make homemade pizza rolls to guarantee the presence of cheese.
One homemade pizza roll hack involves stuffing wonton wrappers with parmesan, provolone, and mozzarella to create a true triple-cheese delicacy. Other people prefer the frozen pizza method of making pizza rolls. They thaw a pizza, add more cheese, roll it up, and cut it into pinwheels to make particularly aesthetic pizza rolls. However you choose to make your cheesy pizza rolls, they'll likely be better than Totino's Triple Cheese version.
5. Pepperoni Pizza Rolls
The reason Totino's Pepperoni Pizza Rolls fall in the middle of this ranking is they are mediocre. The taste isn't as off-putting as the FaZe Clan flavors like orange and Buffalo-style chicken, and it's not as disappointing as bacon or triple pepperoni either. The promise of those flavors sets your expectations high, but these modest pepperoni pizza rolls are just about what you'd expect from a frozen appetizer. The filling isn't mind-blowing and it doesn't taste strongly of pepperoni (you could easily get these mixed up with the cheese flavor), but it tastes good enough that you'd probably chow through a plate if you were distracted by the TV.
To prepare Pepperoni Pizza Rolls, or any flavor, the label recommends using the oven, microwave, or air fryer. In the oven, the crust on the outside gets a bit crisp, but remains chewy in some places. It would be best to avoid the microwave, as it accents the chewiness. An air fryer produces the best pizza rolls if you're seeking a nice crisp crust, but limits you to a single layer in the basket. That could make it hard to feed a crowd at a gathering, so if you need mass quantities of pizza rolls at once, the oven is your best bet.
4. Combination Pizza Rolls
The packaging on Totino's Combination Pizza Rolls promises a snack filled with pepperoni, sausage, chicken, and pork, but the taste isn't that much different from a pepperoni roll. A glance at the photo of the filling shows that it looks about the same as the pepperoni roll too. You may be able to pick out a bit of chicken here or a little piece of sausage there, but you will not find all of the ingredients in every pizza roll. Usually, a combination pizza from a pizzeria would also include mushrooms or olives, so you might expect to find them in this roll as well. Unfortunately Totino's didn't include these ingredients in its Combination Pizza Rolls.
The taste of these rolls is not life-changing, but it's good enough to keep the little ones happy at a kid's birthday party, for example. This is an easy finger food that won't leave much of a mess behind except for greasy fingerprints. Real combination pizza, although far tastier, would likely cost more and pose more of a threat to the cleanliness of your living room. For that reason, getting these pizza rolls may be worth the average taste.
3. Cheese Pizza Rolls
When you cut open one of Totino's Cheese Pizza Rolls, the filling kind of bursts out. Of all of the pizza roll flavors included in this ranking, this is the one with the most abundant stuffing, a quality that placed it high on the list. Unfortunately, the negative point of this flavor is pretty distressing -- the filling is not made of cheese. The ingredient list on the package reveals these contain more imitation mozzarella cheese than they do real mozzarella, but the taste is bearable and perhaps even pleasant if you just accept them for what they are.
These pizza rolls would likely appease guests at a get-together, but they're not likely to wow anyone. You could try dressing up these appetizers with fancy dipping sauces to improve the situation. Imagine your table with a huge platter of pizza rolls in the center and little bowls of sauces all around -- blue cheese, Buffalo, marinara, ranch, and spinach parmesan. That'll makes eating pizza rolls even more fun and no one will have to taste the fake cheese.
2. Triple Meat Pizza Rolls
A bite of a Totino's Triple Meat Pizza Rolls reveals some textural variation, and the filling does not feel as smooth as some of the other varieties in this ranking. The taste is pleasant with subtle notes of ground beef. It's also much more distinctive than the cheese, pepperoni, and combination flavors.
According to the front of the package, these are supposed to include chicken, sausage, pepperoni, pork, and beef. That sounds promising, but the ingredients on the rear tell another story. Much of the meat is mechanically separated chicken and pork. The same is true of hot dogs, though, and people still love them. Even so, if you're on the lookout for a meatier triple-meat pizza roll, you could stuff a wonton wrapper with a slice of pepperoni, a bit of sausage, some ground beef, and mozzarella. Getting those ingredients together would likely cost significantly more than buying Totino's, so at the very least you can applaud the company for its low prices.
1. Supreme Pizza Rolls
Totino's Supreme Pizza Rolls really taste like supreme pizza. My first reaction to trying one was, "This has green bell pepper in it." Sure enough, when I cut one open for the photo, I found a bit of green bell pepper inside. Supreme pizza is delicious because it combines ingredients like mushrooms, olives, green peppers, and a variety of meats.
These pizza rolls emulate that flavor well, even if they do so with imitation cheese, mechanically separated chicken, and less than 2% bell pepper. Maybe the fact that I found one was just a fluke! Even with that questionable ingredient list, this flavor of pizza roll easily beats out the rest. If you can only pick up one kind of pizza roll for your party, get Supreme. Of course, if you can, just buy a supreme pizza instead -- Sam's Club sells the deluxe pizza for cheap at the food court and it's far more delicious than these pizza rolls.
Methodology
After procuring all 10 flavors of Totino's Pizza Rolls from my local supermarkets, taste testing them wasn't easy. The problem was they all tasted so alike that it was difficult to come up with an honest ranking. I tasted each variety on four separate occasions before coming to a final decision.
The first taste test was blind. I put a single pizza roll in each hole of a muffin tin, separately writing down which variety was in each spot and hiding the paper. I was able to identify the Triple Meat, Supreme, Orange Chicken, Buffalo Style Chicken, and Bacon & Pepperoni without sneaking a peak, as these all had a distinctive taste, whereas the rest all seemed to be about the same. I placed papers marked with numbers one through 10 in the muffin tin to rank the pizza rolls as I tried them during the taste test.
The following three taste tests confirmed what the first had revealed; although there are 10 different varieties of Totino's Pizza Rolls, for the most part, they all taste the same. I didn't love any of them and would prefer a regular pizza or homemade pizza rolls in most cases. Even my children weren't big fans of this product and they love most junk food.
Read the original article on Mashed.
