But snake? And to go one step further, snake soup? Now that’s a twist.
Snake soup, a dish originally served in Guangdong, southern China, is steeped in tradition and has a history going back more than 2,000 years. Considered a seasonal delicacy, it is served in winter.
A traditional snake soup, known as seh gung in Cantonese, has a thick broth brewed from chicken and pork and is typically made using the flesh of between two and five breeds of snake.
They tried their best to boil down the snake soup base to the right consistency. They tried a lot of different textures
It also contains thinly sliced strips of wood ear fungus, bamboo shoot, and shiitake mushrooms and is garnished with fried wonton skins, pale chrysanthemum petals, and julienned lime leaf to offset the gaminess of the snake.
According to the principles of traditional Chinese medicine, snake is a yang ingredient, thought to combat the cooling yin energy – in other words, it is believed to warm the body from inside out and act as a shield against the cold of winter.
The breeds of snake whose flesh is typically used in the best snake soup include the venomous Chinese cobra and banded krait, the radiated rat snake and long-nosed pit viper, all of which are commonly found in southeast China.
Here’s what Post food writers made of the Pizza Hut snake soup pizza.
First impressions
“I hope it doesn’t scare you,” jokes Ser Wong Fun’s Gigi Ng before we receive the pizzas at the Post’s office. Posters advertising the pizza feature a hissing snake, but the reality is much less frightening.
The first of the small pizzas delivered by Pizza Hut is opened to much fanfare, but if you hadn’t told us in advance what we were eating, you would think we had ordered a chicken and mushroom pizza. The topping includes big chunks of both.
The main point of snake soup is the texture of the ingredients, which are thinly shredded and presented in harmony, but this seems lazy and doesn’t replicate the look of a snake soup either (perhaps I’m expecting too much from a pizza chain?).
Making the pizza base took some real R&D, says Ng. It doesn’t have the tomato sauce typical of pizzas, or even a white cheese sauce base – it is made purely of boiled down snake soup.
“They tried their best to boil down the snake soup base to the right consistency,” says Ng. “They tried a lot of different textures. If it’s too wet, then when they pour it over the pizza base and bake it, it will become too soggy. But if it’s too thick, then it doesn’t look good.”
The base is a little spongy, but even after being reheated in a microwave oven the pizza retains something akin to structural integrity. The soup layer isn’t too gelatinous, thankfully, and doesn’t just slide off the pie as I feared it might.
Two small plastic pots contain shredded lime leaf and white chrysanthemum petals, but there isn’t enough of either. Immediately we note the absence of what is arguably the most fun part of snake soup – the crunchy, golden fried wonton skins that you’re meant to crumble over before digging in, for a pleasing textural contrast.
“Snake has a grassy flavour to it and it was definitely present in the base sauce. I felt, by comparison, the soup has more balanced umami to it, probably from premium ingredients such as fish maw and abalone,” said Post senior reporter Lisa Cam.
Because we also brought the real deal from Ser Wong Fun to compare and contrast, it was obvious that the snake soup was much fuller in flavour – you could taste the umami of the broth, and feel the pleasing contrast of the crunchy fungus and chewier snake, with the fragrant lime leaf and crunchy wonton skins; the aroma of fermented bean curd completed the experience.
Eating the pizza, in comparison, was like going to a rock concert with noise cancelling earphones – the flavours were muted and fleeting, and a little dumbed down. If you were worried about trying snake soup, this might be a PG version to introduce it to your taste buds.
Cam said: “On the whole, the pizza leans towards a cheese and mushroom pizza. For those who want the novelty of eating snake but don’t have access to a snake soup restaurant, the pizza isn’t a bad option.”
What did others think?
Peter Chang, the writer behind the food blog Diary of a Growing Boy, tried the pizza earlier in the week.
“I’m always up for interesting and new twists when it comes to food, and I do love a good snake soup,” he tells us. “Having tried Pizza Hut’s durian pizza last year, in comparison this isn’t so strange.“Even before biting down on the first slice, the scent of kaffir lime leaf already lit up my olfactory senses. Together with the chrysanthemum petals, shredded wood ear, snake meat … I found the flavours pretty close to what a bowl of snake soup would be,” he says.
Chang says that if he were giving diners advice, he would recommend ordering the thin crust version of the pizza, since the texture would more closely resemble the crunch of fried wonton skins that is added to snake soup.
Wilson Lo, the Instagrammer behind the account @hungrygrumpster, had mixed feelings about the pizza as well.
“I appreciate the ingenuity and the fact that they partnered with Ser Wong Fun,” he says. “The actual pizza was more interesting than tasty, but impressively – for good or bad – it recreated the [thick soup] texture in the pizza with a thickish, gloopy sauce.
“It’s very distinctly Canto tasting, with the dried tangerine peels being the most distinctive flavour. Unfortunately my pizza came with green scallions instead of the promised [lime leaves] so it was missing some of the distinctive citrus flavours.”
The Ser Wong Fun and Pizza Hut collaboration pizza is available until November 22, 2023, at selected Pizza Hut branches and through Foodpanda.
