Tuna Sashimi “Pizza”

For me, this was without a doubt the toughest of the ten Project Food Blog challenges. You see, I’ve been travelling around Asia for over three weeks now, and while I managed to get challenges one through four scheduled before I left, FoodBuzz hadn’t posted the dish for challenge five before my departure.

Since Japanese kitchens don’t typically have ovens, I was vaguely concerned about a cake or bread showing up, but I figured I could always do a steamed cake or bun on the stove. I never anticipated pizza to show up as the dish upon which we needed to base our fifth entry. A steamed pizza didn’t sound very appetizing, and while I was able to find some pre-baked naan at a grocery store here, making an Indian-style pizza just didn’t seem like it was making good use of the locally available ingredients.

Thankfully, the prompt for the challenge had a very vague definition of pizza, listing the requirements as having a “solid base, a sauce and at least one topping”. The title of the challenge, “Recipe Remix” seemed to imply that we weren’t aiming for authenticity, so I decided to run with it and see if I could come up with a Japanese style pizza.

Watch the video below (shot on an iPod Touch) to see what my supermarket run yielded and get a peak at my hometown: Kadogawa, Japan.

My first attempt was a Japanese take on a Pizza Margherita. It turned out looking great, but heating the rice cracker in the fish grill, once it had wet ingredients on top, proved to be a bad idea. The crispy rice cracker to soaked up the liquid, giving it a stale texture in the middle.