The 14 Best Canned Ingredients To Spruce Up Frozen Pizza

Few foods are easier to prepare than frozen pizza. All you have to do is preheat the oven, remove the 'za's plastic wrapping, stick it in the oven to bake, and voila — dinner is served in 20-25 minutes with minimal effort. Gone are the days of crust that tastes like cardboard and freezer-burned pepperoni: There's a huge selection of frozen pies on the market today, including plenty of vegan, gluten-free, and traditional options, some of which are pretty bomb. Frozen pizzas range in price, but most are affordable and filling enough that it's a good idea to keep one or two in your freezer in case of dinner emergencies.

Frozen pizzas may not hit like their freshly-made counterparts, but there are definitely some cool ways to elevate your frozen pizza, including basting and seasoning the crust prior to baking, cranking up the oven to a higher temperature, and allowing your frozen pizza to thaw out before adding any extras ... and boy, there are a whole lotta extras to consider. You've got extra cheese (never a bad idea), fresh veggies and herbs, seasoning blends, and more. When you're really just looking for a quick, cheap, no-fuss fix, canned ingredients can come to the rescue. Ensure any canned ingredients have been drained of excess liquid and dried with a paper towel if needed to prevent sogginess. From sweet to spicy, here are 15 canned foods that will help spruce up your frozen pizza.

There are so many great ways to use canned green chiles. Cook them down with your homemade taco meat, use them to create a green chile sauce for your chicken empanada recipe, toss them in a turkey wrap, or amp up the flavor of your frozen pizza. Canned green chiles have a sweet, juicy heat that plays well with the flavors of common pizza ingredients like pepperoni, tomato sauce, black olives, cheese, and more.

Canned green chiles generally contain quite a bit of excess liquid, so if you're using them to spice up a frozen pie, make sure to thoroughly drain the canned chile peppers and dry them with a paper or dish towel to prevent the liquid from soaking through to the crust. Although there's a little more preparation involved than there would be in simply adding sliced fresh peppers to a pizza, canned green chiles have a different taste than fresh chiles (a little sweeter and more vinegary). This is a great way to add a kick to your creation without the more intense heat of peppers like jalapeños and habaneros.

A rich, hearty side of marinara sauce can distract from the taste of the worst frozen pizza, or elevate the flavors in the best of them. Marinara is a classic red sauce, and while you can certainly find it pre-made in a jar, the ability to whip together a fast marinara sauce on the fly is a skill every home cook should have in their repertoire. Luckily, making a batch from scratch(ish) requires little more than canned crushed tomatoes, a couple of aromatics, olive oil, and a few common spices.

Marinara can be paired with just about any type of pizza, including those with pesto, olive oil, or white sauce bases — it's just that good. Add a little zing to a veggie pesto pie, offset the heaviness of dairy in a chicken Alfredo variety, or dunk your classic pepperoni into the homemade sauce. You won't be able to use your brilliant, made-with-love marinara as the base for your frozen pizza, since frozen pies come with ingredients pre-assembled, but it'll make a lovely accompaniment to a finished slice.

Mushrooms are hot commodities in the pizza world, making appearances on many different types of homemade, restaurant, and frozen slices. A meaty texture and earthy, umami-rich flavor make mushrooms a plant-based meat substitute, and they're pretty healthy to boot, boasting plenty of antioxidants, lots of B vitamins, and important minerals per serving. They're an easy and nutritious way to beef up a frozen pizza, and if you don't have fresh 'shrooms on hand, a canned variety will work just as well. 

Though sliced mushrooms straight from the can and drained are fine and dandy, you may wish to spruce them up by roasting, cooking them with herbs or spices on the stovetop, or throwing them in a quick marinade for a flavor boost. As always, if you're using them straight from the can, be sure your sliced mushrooms have been thoroughly drained and patted dry before tossing them on a pizza.

If you're out of fresh peppers but crave a spicy kick for your frozen pizzas, canned jalapeños offer an easy solution. Often found in the Latin foods area of the supermarket, canned jalapeños come in whole, sliced, and diced varieties, and are often pickled in water, vinegar, salt, and spices. Canned peppers are generally milder than their fresh counterparts, but if they've been preserved with other hot spices, they may equal or exceed the spiciness of fresh peppers. The pickled varieties bring a vinegary brine to the table, and depending on what other spices are used (garlic, cayenne, etc.), one brand's canned jalapeño may taste noticeably different from another's.

Regardless, canned peppers are quick to prepare (just drain and dry) and add to last-minute pizza. To spice up every bite, consider using a diced version — you'll still want to drain excess liquid, but the smaller chunks resulting from a dice will provide more even coverage over the entire pie. If you just want a little blast in each bite, sliced jalapeños are the way to go.

Few pizza toppings are as polarizing as pineapple. The question of whether pineapple belongs on pizza is an age-old debate, and whatever your stance, you're unlikely to change anyone's mind when it comes to this hot topic. A little sweetness is complementary with many other flavors (just look at the sweet-and-spicy creation of pepper jelly, or the salty sweetness of fresh sea salt sprinkled on fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies) — there's really no right answer here, it all comes down to personal preference. Pineapple has long been used to add a bright, tropical pop to Hawaiian pizza, where it's usually accompanied by toppings like Canadian bacon, red onions, tomato sauce, and cheese, but there are plenty of other pies that can benefit from the inclusion of this tropical fruit.

Fruit is a sweet addition that will totally transform your frozen pizza. Pineapple is certainly not your only fruit option — nowadays, pizza restaurants are slinging out some innovative fruity combos like apple and Brie, fig jam and caramelized onion, and more — but we're talking about canned foods here, and canned pineapple is both common and affordable. Canned pineapple is usually processed and stored in pineapple juice, so you'll want to thoroughly drain the juice and pat the chunks dry before adding them to your masterpiece.

Beets have an enormously complex flavor profile. They're quite sweet for root vegetables (especially if roasted or cooked in another way), but they maintain a perceptible earthy quality. Anyone who's ever worked with raw beets will tell you that preparing them is a perilous feat. Beets are incredibly dense and difficult to cut, and their brilliant, almost bloodlike red juice is quick to stain anything it touches — in fact, the color is so stunning that beet juice can function as a natural dye or red food coloring substitute. Pro tip: Wear dark colors if you're cutting raw beets and can't track down an apron.

Luckily, beets are a common canned good, and sliced beets eliminate the need for a sharp knife and a black T-shirt. While beets aren't a pizza topping one sees every day, their impressive nutritional profile (the root veggies are high in folate, manganese, and copper) and unique flavor makes them a great option for sprucing up your frozen pizza. When draining your beets, exercise caution, as beetroots' bright red color will lend its hue even to beets canned in water or olive oil. Add canned sliced beets to frozen pies like meat lovers, black truffle and prosciutto, Mediterranean, or whatever your beet-colored heart prefers.

Popular in Chinese cuisine, the water chestnut is actually not a nut at all — in fact, far from it. They're aquatic tubers which, when eaten fresh, have a sweet, nutty flavor and a crisp texture similar to jicama. However, it's much easier (and cost-effective) to find canned water chestnuts. Canned water chestnuts have very little flavor at the end of the day, so their function in food is almost strictly for texture purposes. If you're a rule-breaker, consider topping your frozen pizza with canned water chestnuts to add some crunch to each bite.

Due to their extremely mild taste, canned water chestnuts can be added to many varieties of frozen 'za without affecting the flavors of the other ingredients at all. Given that most of us are familiar with water chestnuts in Asian foods, it'll shine on something like California Pizza Kitchen's Thai chicken pizza, but could also be good for toning down the heat on a spicy sausage pie, adding a crunch to pepperoni and cheese, or transforming the texture of a black truffle-forward pizza without distracting from the mushrooms' luxurious, umami-rich quality.