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Pizza Hut Japan’s pickled plum pizza is mercilessly aware of what it is【Taste test】

Casey Baseel May 24, 2024
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We try to wrap our head around the “Japanese Margherita” umeboshi pizza.

So how did you spend the last few days? Here at SoraNews24, we’ve been trying to figure out just how crazy Pizza Hut Japan is for creating a pizza with umeboshi, or Japanese pickled plums.

Both pizza and umeboshi have been around for many generations, and no one ever felt the need to try combining them before now. On the other hand, you could argue that plums and tomatoes, by nature of both having a mix of sweet and tart notes in their flavor profiles, aren’t really all that different. Pizza Hut is even billing its plum pizza, which it calls the Umegherita, as a “Japanese pizza Margherita.”

Needless to say, we spent a few sleepless nights mulling all this over, and then just decided the only way to get a definitive answer as to whether or not this thing has any business existing in our world was to eat one for ourselves, which is what we did when the Umegherita went on sale May 20.

To recap, the Umegherita is a crispy crust pizza in which every single slice has Shirara, a type of umeboshi made from plums grown in Wakayama Prefecture and allowed to ripen until they fall off the tree branch naturally. Instead of tomato sauce, the Umegherita is made with ume (Japanese plum) sauce, with oba leaves (sometimes referred to as “Japanese basil”) and a mix of mozzarella and gouda cheese. The Umegherita is priced at 2,600 yen (US$16.75) and will be available until June 12 or supplies run out.

▼ And no, the plums aren’t sliced or diced. They’re left whole, and with a meaty texture, they definitely make their presence known.

Taste-testing duties fell to our Japanese-language reporter Daiki Nishimoto. Lifting a piece, he could see that Pizza Hut doesn’t skimp on the plum sauce, which is a bright pink color.

It doesn’t look like any pizza we’ve ever seen before, and it doesn’t taste like any of them either, but the Umegherita does taste exactly how it looks. The flavor of plums comes on instantly, and kicks up to an even higher notch when you start chewing the umeboshi themselves, which are pleasantly tender after baking.

And you know what? For as unorthodox as the whole idea is, Daiki thinks the Umegherita tastes great! We probably should, however, say it tastes great as long as you love the sweet-and-tart flavor of Japanese plumes.

That’s because from start to finish the plum sensation never lets up. If you were looking for a delicate dance of flavors on your taste buds, for the ume to take turns with other flavors or mix with the other ingredients to provide them with a subtle plum accent, the Umegherita isn’t your pizza. No, this is for people who love ume, and so the plum flavor is what comes first for the entire pizza, with every other ingredient somewhere much lower down the list in how much it contributes to what you’re tasting.

But hey, what would be the point in making an ume pizza without giving it some serious ume flavor? The Umegherita showed Daiki that as long as you like Japanese plums and you like pizza, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll like Japanese plum pizza.

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[ Read in Japanese ]