Review: Little Caesars - Crazy Calzony

Little Caesars Crazy Calzony is a part-pizza, part-calzone mash-up that features a pepperoni pizza (pizza sauce, mozzarella and Muenster cheese, and pepperoni) at its center with four folded calzone-like arms that come filled with garlic white sauce, mozzarella cheese, and julienned pepperoni. The calzone portion comes brushed with buttery garlic sauce and the whole thing gets a generous sprinkle of parmesan. Crazy Sauce (marinara sauce) is included for dipping.

I paid $8.49 for one.

The slices of the Crazy Calzony are interesting. It's not necessarily visible just from looking at it, but each calzone arm is actually cut length-wise down the middle, so you get a slice that includes both the longest and shortest part of the Calzony.

It would not be wrong to say that the calzone portion is just like the chain's Crazy Bread filled with cheese, garlic white sauce, and pepperoni, but it does have a few surprises up its sleeve. For one, with the increased surface area from the folds and the fact that, unlike Crazy Bread, it's not wrapped up in wax paper and put in a bag to steam with its own heat, there's more browning and crispiness to the crust to go with the chewy and fairly uniform crumb (that's the term for the inside part of bread). Like Crazy Bread, you get the same buttery garlic flavor and salty hit of parmesan. The marinara helps to break up the richness if you feel you need it, but I was fine just eating it as is.

Inside the calzone, you get an oozy mixture of cheese and garlic white sauce that offered more stretch and pull than you're typically going to see from one of the Big Four pizza chains. It's a bit thinner and less resilient than melted cheese alone but less runny and more cohesive than just sauce. Furthermore, it's still oozy and gooey at room temperature.

Flavor-wise, there's a generically mild creaminess and saltiness to go with some garlic notes. The julienne pepperoni worked out rather well, as it carried the salty and slightly smoky pepperoni flavor better throughout the calzone portion. Plus, the benefit from having thin slices--the crispiness--isn't ever realized in an enclosed filling.

The pepperoni pizza portion is pretty small but offered the fairly run-of-the-mill pepperoni pizza experience that you get with their Classic Pepperoni Pizza. It can, however, get pretty salty where the calzone meets the pizza, as you can sometimes get a mouthful of pepperoni there.

Overall, Little Caesars Crazy Calzony turned out pretty well (although it seems like a pain to make). Gimmick aside, I liked it most for what I'd call a "Crazy-Bread-plus experience," as I got the flavors of Crazy Bread but with better and a lot more varied textures, as well as a lot more flavors from the sauce, cheeses, and pepperoni. I would note, however, that the buttery sauce leaks from the Calzony quite a bit and could soak through the box in some instances, so be careful where you place it.

Nutritional Info - Little Caesars Crazy Calzony
Calories - 2560 (from Fat - 1090)
Fat - 123g (Saturated Fat - 50g)
Sodium - 6010mg
Carbs - 256g (Sugar - 15g)
Protein - 109g