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.
Ingredients
- 4 salt rice very large flavored crackers (about 6" in diameter)
- 4 ounces Ahi tuna sashimi grade slightly frozen
- 2 tablespoons mayonaise Kewpie
- 1 tablespoon olive oil
- 4 shiso green leaves , cut into chiffonade
- 1 package daikon kaiware sprouts
- sea salt
Steps
- Lightly toast the rice crackers so they are nice and crispy (be careful not to burn them).
- Before you start assembling these, make sure you have all the toppings ready as they need to be eaten immediately after being assembled.
- Slice the semi frozen tuna as thin as possible (think prosciutto thin).
- Mix the mayonaise, kabosu zest and kabosu juice until combined. When all the ingredients are ready, use a pastry brush to paint on a thin layer of the citrus mayo on the rice cracker. Top with some tuna slices, then use a different pastry brush to apply a thin coating of olive oil. Top with some green shiso and kaiware daikon, then sprinkle on a pinch of sea salt.
- Serve immediately.
