When I first got here I took a trip to a small terrace town called Batad. To my surprise, the inn I stayed at offered pizza on their menu. I tend to believe that you should always eat what a local culture makes best—not their western food attempts. But what they tend to make best around here is boiled meat, boiled vegetables, and rice. Besides, the thought of pizza while sitting outside looking out over a mountain of terraces tempted me too much to resist.

A half hour after we ordered, the woman brought the pizza out for my friend and I; one was simply grilled onions, garlic, and a little bit of cheese, and the other was a combination of tomatoes, tuna, egg, and a few other things—an Australian favorite, according to my Aussie friend. They were both tasty, but I couldn’t figure out how she’d made the pizza without an oven. She told me she heated it in a pan with a cover on top. Though it wasn’t gourmet—she inspired me to figure out how to do the same.

There’s a device here called a Philcraft—it’s a Teflon pan with a lid that shuts tight. You put it over the stove and the Teflon and outer metal cover heat whatever’s inside pretty evenly. People make brownies, cookies, and pancakes in them…so I figured we could try a pizza. I got Adam all excited about it and we decided to go for it one Sunday afternoon.

The pizza making coalition

Somehow the pizza making turned into a huge affair. Adam and I went to the market with some of the kids next door and bought tomatoes, pineapple, onions, and garlic. We told one girl at the market what we were up to as we thought about what kind of toppings to buy.

“What do you think we should put on it?” Adam asked her.
Within a second she replied, “Hotdog.”
Hotdog. That’s how you do pizza Filipino style. Adam looked over at me and raised his eyebrow. I shook my head. No hotdog.

The whole process took us about four hours. The neighbor kids cut and chopped the tomatoes, onions and garlic for the pizza sauce that I insisted should be made from scratch. I didn’t want to use Filipino pizza sauce recipes—all of them had sugar and MSG. Filipinos love sweet pizzas and they put MSG on everything. So, we ended up cooking the sauce and then blending it down. It wasn’t quite what I wanted—it didn’t have the tart flavor that usually comes from tomato paste—but it was good. I had kids grating cheese, cutting pineapples, peeling garlic, chopping onions and crying. Actually I did most of the onion crying—the little onions we used, while seemingly small and innocuous, were brutal.

One thing we realized afterwards is that good cheese really makes or breaks a pizza. All they have for “cheese” around here (besides Filipino soap operas) is a brand called “Eden Cheese.” It’s basically a block of cheese whiz. Faced with Eden cheese or cheese-less pizza, we figured we’d try it with the cheese.

Unfortunately all of our momentum stopped once we had to cook the pizzas. I wasn’t sure how long it would take to cook the pizza so that the cheese would melt and the crust would cook without getting burnt. I cooked one side of the crust for awhile—since it wouldn’t get grilled from the top like in a normal oven—and then flipped it over and put the sauce on. Then I just let it cook on low for about twenty minutes or so.

Pizza in the Philkraft

The pizza turned out alright. We put a few hardboiled eggs on one (won’t do that again) but the best was the tomato, cheese and pineapple. A few wonderful things happened as a result—the pizzas got eaten up by the family, who claimed they were delicious, and we got to skip dinner since we were cooking which consisted of some kind of cooked intestines.

I was kind of disappointed with how they turned out. I tried to avoid expectations—I knew it wasn’t going to be like real pizza, but the Eden cheese was horrible. I can’t stand cheese whiz, and it just took away from all the other flavors. The pizza crust, a yeast-free recipe, wasn’t that fantastic either. Mostly though, what deterred me from ever making another pizza was the time it took to make it—four to five hours for four pizzas. It was kind of a sad and funny moment—we tried so hard to recreate something American here, but in the end there are some things you just have to leave back home till you return.