Pizza Hut Japan and a 165-year-old Kyoto tea company have us feeling sticky but happy.

We call the phenomenon of cultures mixing together a melting pot, but today we’re seeing the melting happen in a pizza crust, as the Japanese division of an American restaurant chain specializing in Italian food teams up with a Kyoto tea merchant for a culinary creation unlike anything we’ve ever eaten before.

At the start of this month, Pizza Hut Japan started serving the newest addition to its Handy Melts line. Ordinarily, the Handy Melts are a crisp, triangular folded pizza slice that come in a tear-away box so that you can eat them with one hand, and feature the usual assortments of savory pizza toppings.

▼ A standard margherita Handy Melt

But as part of a collaboration with Kyoto matcha producer Gion Tsujiri, Pizza Hut now has green tea Handy Melts too. These aren’t matcha crepes, either. They still use pizza dough for their crust, which is cooked to a crispy texture, but the dough is enhanced with green tea powder using Gion Tsujiri matcha grown in the town of Uji, Japan’s most celebrated matcha-farming community. The Handy Melts Matcha Shiratama Kuromitsu’s fillings feature Japanese dessert all-stars matcha an (sweet bean paste) and shiratama (mochi dumplings), but they share space with mozzarella and cream cheeses, and you also get a packet of kuromitsu (brown sugar syrup, anther Japanese sweets staple) to pour over everything.

So yes, there’s a lot going on here, and we weren’t quite sure how it was all going to work as our reporter Yayoi Saginomiya, who’d be performing taste—test duties, opened up the classy special box that the Handy Melts Matcha Shiratama Kuromitsu comes in.

Taking the top off revealed a folded crust with an enticingly deep green color, but before digging in, Yayoi opened up the packet of kuromitsu, which comes taped to the back of the box, and poured it on top. With the matcha Handy Melts now wearing its full regalia, it was time to take a bite…

…and it tasted every bit as matcha-y as it looked! Matcha sweets have the tricky task of needing to provide both enough bitterness to be recognizable as green tea, while also letting the ingredients’ subtle but underlying sweetness come through. Pizza Hut’s matcha Handy Melt is up to the task on both counts, and the kuromitsu brings the flavor profile to a satisfyingly sweet finish that sets up the next bite.

What sets the Handy Melts Matcha Shiratama Kuromitsu apart from other green tea desserts, though is the touch of saltiness in the crust and cheese, plus the richness of the latter. It’s not just the flavors that have a stimulating variety, either, as the crispiness of the crust gives way to the melty cheese and chewy mochi inside, making this a dessert that never gets boring.

Really, Yayoi has just one complaint. Remember how we said the kuromitsu comes packaged separately, in a little pouch taped to the back of the box?

It’s nice that this lets you regulate how much or how little of the sauce you want to use, but we think there’s also another reason Pizza Hut chooses to serve it this way, which is that once you pour on the sauce, it makes the Handy Melts Matcha Shiratama Kuromitsu a mess to hold and eat. The concept behind the Handy Melts series is that you’re supposed to be able to eat them with one hand, but in the case of this one, that hand is going to get stickily coated in runoff kuromitsu.

With the Handy Melts Matcha Shiratama Kuromitsu (which is priced at 550 yen [US$3.70]) being a limited-time item that’s only sticking around until October 26 or whenever supplies run out, it’s unlikely that Pizza Hut is going to design a new box or otherwise devise a way to make eating it less messy, so we’re just going to have to live with this one drawback. Besides, if we have to choose between a dessert that’s messy but delicious or one that’s tidy and bland, we’ll pick the first one each and every time.

Margherita Handy Melt image: Pizza Hut Japan
All other photos © SoraNews24
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