Pizza Night

I'm still in the midst of unpacking and unsorting my place after the last move, and my sister was nice enough to suffer through collaborating on a pizza dinner while a randomly giant futon frame sat right in the middle of my kitchen/living room/workspace, awaiting removal.

We had come up with the idea of making an Indian Butter Chicken Pizza and an Okonomiyaki Pizza some time ago during a random conversation. So we used the thin crust recipe from The Kitchn and experimented with toppings.

Butter Chicken Pizza

1 portion the thin crust dough, rolled out to 10" diameter
2 cups diced cooked chicken
1/2 cup sauteed onions
1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
1/2 cup diced yellow and red bell peppers
1 large chopped roma tomato
1 cup President's Choice Indian Butter Chicken Sauce
2 tsps minced garlic

I highly recommend ditching the President's Choice brand sauce in favor of using Sharwood's Butter Chicken sauce, if you are to use a jar sauce to save time. Partially, the reason I only came up with the Butter Chicken Pizza idea was that I had this leftover sauce in my fridge that needed to be used up. The PC brand just doesn't do it--it smells terrific out of the jar, but somehow tastes completely watered down. I would also veto Patak's brand butter chicken sauce if you're looking for something closer to an authentic South Asian flavor.




Okonomiyaki Pizza

2 cups shredded, sauteed cabbage
1 cup chopped baby cuttlefish
1/2 cup sliced mushrooms
1/4 cup diced red peppers
1 cup Okonomiyaki sauce

For garnish:
1/2 cup shredded dried nori
2 tsps dried bonito flakes
2 tsps chopped green onion
a sprinkle of toasted sesame seeds
a generous drizzle of Kewpie mayonnaise




Didn't have any okonomiyaki sauce on hand, so we raided my fridge and mixed tonkatsu sauce, Worchestershire sauce and ketchup to make a reasonably tasty approximation of it. I'm sure numerous variations of okonomiyaki pizza can be made--minced pork, scrambled egg, soba noodles, mashed potato, octopus, shrimp, dried anchovies can all be added or substituted. The hard part is fitting everything in--our okonomiyaki pizza was more of a mountain, as we observed the cuttlefish and mushrooms slowly cascade downwards in the oven! Oh yeah, and it tasted really really good.