Snakes on a pie

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I was targeted an ad on social media near the end of last month, and it greatly piqued my interest. Pizza Hut was, apparently, doing a collaboration with Ser Wong Fun (蛇王芬), and offering not one but two different pizzas based on what the latter is famous for. One of them would be traditional Cantonese snake soup (蛇羹). Now THIS I gotta try!

Knowing that Foursheets would rather jump off a cliff than go to a Pizza Hut with me, I set out to do this project solo. That means I can't take more than one pizza in one session, and must do this over two days. Fortunately there is one outlet not far away in my hood.

Once I sat down, the staff showed me the various menus with the items on offer. There's a special standalone menu for this particular promotion.

Snake soup pizza (大吃一驚蛇羹批), thin crust - the familiar fragrance of kaffir lime leaves hit my olfactory senses as soon as the pie is placed in front of me. I saw both shreds and chunks of snake meat, along with fresh chrysanthemum petals, shiitake, dried strips of wood ear (木耳), bamboo shoots, coriander, and of course cheese.

I though the flavors of the snake soup translated pretty well to the pizza. Of course the aromatics helped a lot, and there was a clear gel on top of the pizza that was meant to evoke the sensation of eating the thickened snake soup, which was actually the soup base that had been boiled down. I'd say they did a pretty good job from what I had.

Halfway through my pizza, I was glad that I ordered the thin crust version for two reasons: first, the reduced volume made it easier to finish the whole pizza by myself; but second, and more importantly, the crunchy thin crust helped to create the similar texture of the deep-fried wonton skins (薄脆) which are traditionally added to snake soup together with chrysanthemum petals and shredded kaffir lime leaves.

I was pretty satisfied with this experience, so few days later I went back for the second option. The staff recognized me from my last visit and asked me what I thought of the snake pizza, as they haven't had the chance to try it yet themselves.

Double flavour preserved sausage pizza (驚料猛量雙腸批) - I had heard through the grapevine that this was the preferred option out of the two, and to be honest, just about any kind of sausage would do well on a pizza. In fact, there was this pizza fight a few years ago that featured two kinds of Cantonese preserved sausage...

In addition to having both the preserved pork sausage (臘腸) and duck liver sausage (膶腸), there were also bits of puffed rice as well as diced spring onion, which evoked the feeling of having clay pot rice with preserved sausage (臘腸煲仔飯).

This pizza doesn't come in a thin crust version, because the rim of the crust has been stuffed not just with the usual cheese but also chunks of both sausages. That make this an automatic winner, and I really loved it.

The only problem with this, though, was that I really couldn't finish it all by myself. I did try, but did not manage. In fact, I definitely ate too much. But I left the restaurant a very, very happy man.