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We make delicious, low(er)-calorie Japanese-style pizza with fried tofu and miso!【Sora Kitchen】

Richard Simmonds Jun 12, 2018
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In our quest to find a cheese-laden pizza we can eat guilt-free, we’ve come across a Japanese-style concoction that’s surprisingly delicious.

All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us? Well, brought peace, and pizza. Simple as it is, the combination of bready dough base and toppings of preference combine for an irresistible feast that makes happy tummies, but it’s not always great for those on a diet. So when we came across a recipe for abura-age (fried tofu) pizza, which uses deep-fried tofu instead of carbohydrate-packed bread for the base we were keen to give it a try.

While deep-fried tofu might not sound like a healthy choice, according to scientific journals fat can be a healthier calorie source than carbohydrates due to its metabolism-boosting properties, making it suitable for ketogenic diets (or presumably Cinderalla diets). It’s also not as calorific as some company’s ‘diet’ pizzas, and it definitely sounds more appetising than previous suggestions we’ve found online for diet pizzas, such as making the dough from cauliflower!

So let’s get to it and take a look at the recipe, and the results, below. First off, these are the ingredients you’ll need to make a particularly Japanese take on the Italian classic, and while you can change them as you see fit, here’s what we went for:

Ingredients

Age-dofu (fried tofu)
Tomato ketchup (although in retrospect, tomato puree or a thick passata would probably taste better and be healthier)
Miso paste
Cherry tomatoes, diced
Cheese, grated
Green peppers, finely sliced
Teeny, tiny shirasu sardines

How to Make

1. Cut along the edge of the soft, soggy fried tofu to open it up like an envelope, splaying this open form the thin, chewy base of our Japanese-style pizza, the oil retained in the tofu also means that the tofu doesn’t burn as quickly as normal pizza dough, so your cheese should be perfectly melted without the base being burnt to cinders.

2. Mix together the tomato sauce with the miso, and then spread it liberally across the fried tofu. While ketchup may be the cheapest, and for us most readily available option, it’s probably worth using tomato puree or passata to smother the tofu with, although the mixed in miso does take away some of the sweetness of the ketchup.

3. Pile on the toppings, in our case the diced tomatoes, sliced green peppers and shirasu, before sprinkling the grated cheese on top. Lastly, place it under the grill on a low heat, cooking until the cheese melts and the exposed parts of the tofu start to brown.

Hopefully it should look something like the picture above, which is prettier than our previous attempt at cooking Mickey Mouse eggs but is it any tastier? The tomato and miso isn’t something we would have tried out normally but it works surprisingly well, giving the tomato a real richness that doesn’t overpower the vegetables and cheese. All in all, a success, now we feel confident enough to risk trying it with precious meat, safe in the knowledge that the health benefit and calorie-saving of the tofu pizza can be put to better use elsewhere or washed down with a couple of the things Asahi are more famous for.