Neo Kobe Pizza

The Domino’s pizza tainting incident is a disgusting reminder to be careful who we hire to prepare our food in restaurants.  What people may not be aware of is that food is being legally tainted in the production line.  The food industry lately has gone to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle level lengths to cut production costs.  Natural diet enthusiasts of many persuasions are warning people to read food labels, and be careful about what they’re eating.

Soy

Soy flour has become a very popular addition to many commercial breads and doughs.  In modern, industrial countries, it’s hard to find any bread in stores of bakeries that doesn’t have soy flour.  In some countries, like Israel and Columbia, bakers are required by law to add soy to their bread.

Soy oil is also becoming an increasingly popular addition to canned tomato sauces.  Many white sauces have soy powder, soy milk, or soy lecithin.

Read more about the dangers of soy, and how food marketers have conned the world into eating more of it.

High Fructose Corn Syrup

High fructose corn syrup is replacting glucose and sucrose (white sugar) in many commercial doughs and sauces.  It does make a difference.  Excess fructose that gets converted to fat tends to build up around the organs and abdomen rather than getting deposited evenly.

What can you do about it?

1. Make your own food from scratch.  If you make it, you know what’s in it.
2. Encourage your local restaurants and chains to make their own pizza dough and sauce, or to get sourced by companies that don’t use soy or high fructose corn syrup.
3. Vote with your dollars, and don’t buy products that contain soy or high fructose corn syrup, even if it’s very tempting.

Be careful out there.

Two very stupid people made video of themselves tainting the food, and posted it on YouTube.  Here are three clips The Consumerist managed to get.  If policies are are so lax at Dominoes as to allow this kind of thing to happen, goodness knows how many more people are doing it but just not being so public about it.

Apparently there are no cameras, and there’s no real supervision.  Kristy Hammonds Thompson and Michael Setzer were able to do what they did pretty much without any special attempts to conceal themselves.  They even had time to laugh about it.

Though the two pizza tainting sociopaths were dumb, Dominoes Pizza was dumb to hire them, and reacted to the situation in an even dumber way.  Rather than issuing a press release upon finding out about them, they went about systematically attempting to suppress the videos.  They went after YouTube, bloggers who ripped and posted the videos, and even people who posted video comments on it.  It’s hard to say which is the worst betrayal of loyal customers: the lack of proper supervision or the abuse of money and power to go after innocent people who were concerned that a couple of nutjobs were flicking boogers into their food.

The food industry is coming under increasing scrutiny of late, and these kinds of incidents don’t help.  Kristy Hammonds Thompson is a registered sex offender.  She was convicted of misdemeanor sexual battery for sexually abusing a teenage girl over a period of four months.

How did she get hired to work at Dominoes, a company that does pizza deliveries and sometimes hires teenagers?  Nobody has a real answer.  Apparently, they just don’t care enough.

It’s a sad day in the world of pizza.  This is one reason why I am very careful where I eat out, and generally prefer cooking my own food.  All this has inspired me to post recipes more often.

HG101’s pictoral on Neo Kobe Pizza, inspired by an interview with Jeremy Blaustein, the person who did the English localization of the Snatcher video game.

This one has great photos as well as suggestions for the specific flavor of miso that makes their preferred basis for the soup.

Camel pimp posts photos of his Neo Kobe pizza dumplings recipe and process.  He decides to make mini calzones and put them in soup.

Since it is impossible to find a food mill for a reasonable price here, I used to press my boiled tomatoes through a strainer.  This was very messy.  Then I realized that there was probably an easier way.  I thought it would be a risk because if you boil tomatoes for too long, they will melt into the water.  So I added a few minutes, bringing them to a boil, and then turning down the heat, and letting them simmer until they looked like they were going to fall apart.

Then, with a slotted spoon, I transferred them to a bowl, and peeled each one, and crushed them with a regular old mashed potato mashing weapon.

This turned out to be a lot easier and a whole lot less messy than pressing them through a strainer.  It tastes just the same, and isn’t any wetter.  I’m very happy with the results.

Here is a photo chronicle of one man’s journey.  He uses canned chicken noodle soup and orders a pizza.

Making your own tomato sauce is very easy.  All you need is a pot, water, and a strainer.

Get some tomatoes that are very ripe.  They should be almost at the end of their edible life, very red and soft.  Boil them for about 15 minutes or until the skins start to split apart, and then press them through the strainer, discarding the peels.

At this point, it might be thinner than you like.  To thicken it, just simmer it slowly while stirring, to reduce it.

From there, you can use it just like you’d use canned sauce.  It just won’t have as much salt, and is very much tastier.

All this writing about soup and pizza got me hungry, so this morning I wanted something fast.  So I made some toaster oven pizzas from thick slices of bread and heated up some leftover chicken soup.

It was delicious!

Neo Kobe pizza is a style of pizza made popular by the video game series Snatcher produced by Konami Digital Entertainment.  Neo Kobe is the name of a city in the game.  So Neo Kobe pizza is basically the style of pizza eaten in Neo Kobe city.

Its origins however, are said by some to be from real life.  In Japan, there is a dish of fried balls of octopus eaten in soup.  The history of soup itself is that it was typically eaten with a piece of bread or dumplings in it.

What’s special about Neo Kobe pizza is that pizza is used as the “sop” for the soup.  You basically soak pizza in hot prepared miso soup until the bread softens and the cheese is melts nicely, and then eat the pizza with chopsticks.  Supposedly, a Japanese student accidentally dropped his pizza into his soup, and took a chance and tried it.  Others say that it was the invention of Jeremy Blaustein, the one who did the localization for Snatcher in English.  Maybe it was a little bit of both.  It has taken awhile though, for the trend to take off.  Snatcher came out in the late 80’s.

It has evolved to include just about any kind of pizza or pizza-like croutons or dumplings in just about any kind of soup.  Some people use mini-pizzas to dunk in the soup, while others bake a pizza pastry on top of a crock of soup.  There are many ways to make it.

I bought this domain basically to reserve it before some exploitive domain squatting business took it.  If Konami wants it for their own purposes, I’m happy to give it to them.  Unless or until that happens though, I don’t mind shamelessly promoting them for free, and sharing Neo Kobe pizza recipes with the world.

Neo Kobe pizza is just a darned good idea.  I’m a long time lover of soup and of pizza.  I’ve been eating Neo Kobe pizza for years even though I wasn’t sure what to call it.  So let’s get to dippin’!