Pizza Hut jumps on the caviar bandwagon — in the weirdest possible way
It’s a real pie-in-the-sky idea.
Caviar is no longer reserved for recession-proof Hamptonites wielding mother-of-pearl spoons.
Pizza Hut has jumped on the bargain Beluga bandwagon by serving up imitation fish eggs on pizza for the hoi polloi.
From Thursday, April 10, through Saturday, April 12, the franchise branch at 932 Eighth Ave. will bait you with bite-sized “Caviar Pizza” pearls created to taste like — surprise — pepperoni.
The tiny nuggets will be served as part of the Pizza Caviar Bump Box, which includes one Personal Pan Pizza and a choice of three plain boneless wings or fries, all of them adorned with the edible orbs.
Total price: just $20, including liberal dollops of “eggs.”
For reference, a tin of classic Osetra sets one back $165 from importer Caviar Russe.
“Pizza Caviar is our way of bringing a touch of indulgence, while staying true to the flavors people love from Pizza Hut,” said Melissa Friebe, chief marketing officer for Pizza Hut, which is offering the phony fish at the Midtown location from 4-8 p.m. on those days while supplies last.
As you might’ve guessed, no sturgeon was harmed making the dish. Instead, the culinary catfishing is comprised of pepperoni-flavored water and agar-agar, a gelatin created from certain species of red algae that’s also used in vegan Jello molds.
“It’s a pepperoni seasoning that we’re mixing with the water solution,” the recipe’s inventor and Global Innovation Chef Alex Yeatts told The Post. “You then heat it up and then drop it down into a vat of cold oil so it purifies, and turns into little pearl sizes. We just do that a couple million times to get it.”
Once congealed, the faux fish roe is then ladled over the 6-inch pie, like a blini for the inflation age.
The pepperoni pearls were reportedly inspired by the rise of “caviar bumps,” a Gen Z trend that involves nibbling a small rail of fish embryos off their hands rather than the traditional spoon.
It became so popular that it fueled a spike in caviar sales.
“We saw an opportunity to take one of today’s biggest food trends and make it our own,” said Friebe of the special, which is one of several fast foods to go upwardly mobile of late, like the wacky hot dog “seafood tower” at Lamar’s Sporting Club in Charleston, South Carolina.
As far as Yates knows, “one has ever done it before,” so it felt “just crazy enough.”
While the Pizza Caviar was surprisingly savory for its size and did a decent job of pinch-hitting for pepperoni atop a pizza, faux fish-freckled fried chicken, meanwhile, evoked a poor man’s version of the $28 caviar chicken nugget at Coqodaq with an added dash of umami to the fries.
Diners may want to spoon a few eggs up on their own first so they can taste the pearls au natural, hitting the tongue like tiny, salty bubble tea pearls.
But caviar connoisseurs will surely miss the real deal — because top-of-the-line golden Osetra this is not.
Comparatively speaking, Pizza Caviar does offer good bang for your buck, as Yeatts estimates that the 24 pounds of the counterfeit creation they cooked up would have cost $200,000 wholesale had they been bonafide fish eggs.
Plus, they’re vegetarian-friendly.
“People who can’t normally eat pepperoni can experience it,” he boasted.
Perhaps the Hut is simply fishing to go haute.
“Why just place caviar on your pizza when you can reimagine it entirely and create a bold, new food category?” reps argued in a press release.
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