indeed...
they overprocess that so much to make it shelf-stable, they probably take all the good stuff out, and then they add back a lot of chemical agents to make it taste good again. That's the part i'm interested in, i wonder what can be done if you take the both of best worlds, fresh dough made properly and add in something extra, what kind of flavors one can develop. People seem to like it, else it wouldnt be so popular. And i'm talking about both frozen and commercial pizzas. I know it's down to cost, convenience etc, but at the end of the day, if it doesnt taste good, people wouldnt buy it. But they do, so there's something there worth exploring, for us amateurs.
I think maybe people have pretty wild ideas about what "processed food" means.
Pizza crust is pretty simple stuff. Flour, water, salt, yeast, and sometimes some oil or sugar.
White flour has been "processed" to remove the germ and bran in large part because the oils naturally found in the germ and bran go rancid pretty quickly after milling so yes that's something that was originally done largely to increase the shelf life. Also because bits of bran in the flour interfere with gluten development. In the days before modern transport, climate control, and sanitation, the shelf-life extension offered by removing the source of oils was a big deal.
I grew up eating whole wheat bread that my dad made from flour he milled in a "Magic Mill" machine - a high speed blade grinder that sounds like a jet engine. I can say that it took him years to master the art of getting a whole wheat loaf to crown *above the edge of the loaf pan, and i can't honestly say that i have any great love of whole wheat bread even though he makes a really good loaf after more than 4 decades of practice, but I've never had a slice of mass-produced whole wheat bread that didn't taste a little rancid to me.
But in much the same way that most americans have funny ideas about what olive oil should taste like, I think most people who really like whole wheat bread actually like that flavor. No accounting for taste i guess.
Flour bleaching was a big deal for shelf life too. All wheat carries fungal spores and when we were less adept at keeping flour cool and dry this was a huge problem for shelf life. I know a guy who used to work in a mill that bleached some of its flour and he described the process as one where the flour is blown in a stream with a mix of a gaseous bleaching factor (I forget the chemical) which was subsequently released through a tall smokestack. Killed all the fungus and bacteria in the flour but also destroyed all of the vitamins, which is why at least in the US you can also get flour enriched with vitamins which are added as a powder after the bleaching process.
Straight bleached flour is also whiter, of course, and if you want a food to be really pale, that's one way to do it. But most pizza crust is made with unbleached flour.
Some pizza crust is made with bromated flour - which has potassium bromate added to enhance elasticity.
In both restaurants and manufactured convenience food, your major flavor enhancers are salt, sugar, and fat.
If you've ever been unable as a home cook to match a dish you had at a restaurant, it's probably because the restaurant uses lots more butter and salt than you would imagine.
In yeasted doughs though, you can do a great deal with fermentation. Time, as Craig said.
And i reiterate, in mass produced convenience food, they literally just add flavors. No time to caramelize those sugars? We can just mix those in. Want to microwave sausage and have it taste like you pan fried it? No problem. But these flavorants and perfumes - purified versions of what you can get through hard work and artistry in cooking - don't have an E-number and if you're making less than a million of something you probably won't get the time of day from the companies that make them.