Do you face a nightly dilemma of whether to choose pizza or lasagne for dinner? No, me neither. But, according to Asda, it’s the source of suppertime squabbles up and down the land. Ever the selfless peace makers, they have found the kind of solution that world leaders dream of. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the pizzagne.
That’s right, a pizza-lasagne mash-up, the kind of cobbling together of Italian classics that will have lovers of La Dolce Vita throwing their spaghetti out of the pram.
To be fair to Asda’s product developers, hybrid foods are on a high. Last year’s winner at the British Pie Awards was a kebab pie. Recent brand mash-ups have included Wotsits macaroni cheese and Gochujang-flavoured Spam, which I rather enjoyed. Marks & Spencer has put strawberries and cream, sorry, crème, in a sandwich, and Heinz morphed tinned spaghetti with a classic carbonara, for goodness’ sake.
But how do you cross a soft pasta bake with a chewy, bread-based finger food? It sounds about as plausible as chicken Kyiv pie, but that one, to be fair, carried off first prize in this year’s Pie Awards. So I approached the challenge of trying the pizzagne with an open mind and an empty stomach.
It turns out that the reality, presented in a foil tray, is a round lasagne finished with some pizza toppings – meatballs or pepperoni. This feels like a bit of a cop out. I was hoping for full double carbs in the great British tradition. The chip butty is practically our national dish, and deep-fried battered jam sandwiches have made it on to the menu at Delia Smith’s Norwich restaurant. If the Scots can put macaroni cheese in a pie, complete with pastry case, and Wiganers can stuff a whole pie in a bread roll, couldn’t we layer lasagne on a thin and crispy bread base?
Alas, the pizzagne has none of the voluptuous generosity of either of its parents. It resembles a lasagne that’s been sat on, a Flat Stanley of foodstuffs. The whole thing is only three pasta sheets deep, which would be fine if the fillings were lavish, but there is no more than a smear of tomato sauce, which reeks of cheap dried oregano. The entire creation is barely a centimetre deep, almost entirely of cheap-tasting, with excessively thick pasta sheets that slide over each other when I attempt to lift a triangular slice.
As for that slice, if the reason you campaigned for a pizza dinner is to dispense with knives and forks, the pizzagne is going to disappoint you profoundly. This is not finger food. It tastes of cheap service-station lasagne, and even some perfectly acceptable salami on top can’t save it.
This Frankenstein’s monster of fast food is proof that by trying to please everyone you may end up pleasing no one. On that point at least, it will unite families everywhere.