Last Updated on February 4, 2023
EDITOR’S NOTE: Aldi has a new recipe for this pizza in 2023. It now has tomato sauce in addition to cheese toppings. Read our review of the new pizza here.
Aldi knows how to celebrate holidays, whether it’s by rolling out wine, cheese, and beer Advent calendars for Christmas, or selling green cheese for St. Patrick’s Day, or stocking the shelves with spooky cheeses for Halloween. When it comes to celebrating the holiday of love, Aldi stocks everything you need for Valentine’s Day, from classic chocolate and candy, cards and flowers, and lobster dinners, to novelties such as heart-shaped cheese and even heart-shaped pizza.
Mama Cozzi’s Take & Bake Pizza My Heart Heart-Shaped Cheese Pizza sold for $4.99 for a 13.65-oz. pizza at the time of publication. It’s a limited-time ALDI Find (Special Buy), so it’s only in stores for a short period and then it’s gone.
The pizza is described as a “heart-shaped crust topped with extra virgin olive oil, mozzarella, white cheddar & provolone cheeses, with Parmesan and Romano cheeses, garlic, and herbs.” The box advertises it’s made with real cheese and bakes fresh in 10-13 minutes. It’s found in the refrigerated ALDI Find section of the store, among the Regular Buy take and bake pizza options.
The pizza serves three people, with one serving coming in at 400 calories, with 19 grams of total fat (24% of your daily value), 8 grams of saturated fat (40% DV), 680 mg of sodium (30% DV), 42 grams of total carbs (15% DV), 1 gram of dietary fiber (4% DV), 3 grams of total sugars, 2 grams of added sugars (4% DV), and 16 grams of protein.
Mama Cozzi’s Pizza My Heart Heart-Shaped Cheese Pizza nutrition information and ingredients. (Click to enlarge.)
To bake the pizza, preheat the oven to 400 degrees and remove the pizza from the packaging. Place the pizza directly on the center oven rack and do not bake the pizza on the cardboard tray. (I opted instead to bake it on a special pizza pan with holes, so my oven doesn’t get pizza drippings all over it.) Bake for 10-13 minutes or until the cheese in the center is melted and the crust is golden.
The pizza after baking.
As for what my family thought of the pizza, well …
It tastes great, with plenty of cheese and seasoning, and my family liked the heart shape. However, it’s really a cheese bread and not a pizza. It does not have any kind of sauce on it. One of the primary components of pizza is pizza sauce or marinara sauce, or even a creamy white garlic or alfredo sauce, but this one has nothing. It consists only of the crust and the cheese topping, plus some olive oil and seasonings.
I baked this for dinner and served a salad alongside it, but it was light as far as dinners go because it was more like cheesy garlic bread served as a side item rather than the main course it was advertised to be. Our family liked it, and they ate it all up, but I also felt like it wasn’t quite truth in advertising. Of course, if they called it cheese bread, they’d have to come up with a different name than Pizza My Heart.
The Verdict:
Mama Cozzi’s heart-shaped pizza isn’t exactly a pizza because it lacks any kind of sauce. It’s composed of a crust topped with olive oil, cheese, garlic, and herbs, and it is more appropriate to call it a cheese bread or cheesy garlic bread. It tastes good, with a generous amount of cheese, but if you’re hoping to serve this as the entree in a Valentine’s Day-themed meal, you may be disappointed to find that it’s more like a side item than a main course.
