Kissaten and Tell: Japan’s Pizza Toast

In December of 2019, Eater.com published Craig Mod’s piece “I Walked 600 Miles Across Japan for Pizza Toast,” a really lovely meditation on Japanese coffeeshop culture, isolation, connection, aesthetics, and probably a half-dozen other things centered around a quest for the comfort food he discovered when first moving to Japan for college, Pizza Toast. For a young American who grew much like I did, on “fried bologna and Spaghetti-Os, Fruit Roll-Ups and Twix,” pizza toast was an approachable snack, and the coffee shops or Kissaten that served it provided a soft landing for him as he adjusted to life in a different culture. It’s a fantastic and brief read, and if you only have time to read one piece about pizza toast today, read his, or perhaps the expanded book-length version available on his website.

Those works are essential. Mine exists for the sake of completeness, or perhaps more aspirationally than anything. When I first saw that article and put pizza toast on our List I thought, well maybe by then I’ll have visited Japan for some other reason and tried one for real. We were all about a hundred years younger back then, naive and foolish. Yet much of this site consists of me traveling the world via my kitchen. If I can’t bring myself to the Kissaten, perhaps I can bring bring the Kissaten to Sandwich Tribunal HQ.

A friend of mine laughed at my description of Pizza Toast as “a coffeeshop snack of a bygone Japan,” saying that it just struck him funny to use such grandiose terms in relation to something that sounds for all the world like an after-preschool snack. And he’s not wrong–pizza toast does sound like a portmanteaued Frankenfood, the type of thing dreamt up by a demanding toddler, like Froot Loops donuts, or an ice cream cotton candy burrito, or the twinkie wiener sandwich, or hell, a taco bowl for that matter.

Never mind the fact that infantile food mashups make up 30% of the average American’s diet, minimum, this one sounds like a child’s made-up snack because in large part, that’s exactly what it is. The examples of pizza toast that Craig Mod describes in his article and in his book use either a “sweet tomato sauce” or in some cases, “ketchup;” they use processed cheese in at least one instance described as “American” cheese; pepperoni sometimes, or salami perhaps; and while the thin slices of tomato, green pepper, or onion that he describes would not have been welcome on my childhood version of pizza bread, there are plenty of kids out there less picky than I was. Pizza toast is, by definition, comfort food.

Take an absurdly fat slab of the whitest, least offensive bread you can find, slather on some tomato sauce, cheese (processed to within an inch of itself), maybe onions and green peppers. After that, it’s up to the chef. It is a hug produced in a toaster oven.

Craig Mod, Kissa by Kissa, Special Projects, Kamakura, 2020. Page 36.

I didn’t have a toaster oven, but I’d give it a shot under the broiler. First, though, I’d need some shokupan, Japanese milk bread, which in addition to being white and inoffensive, is fluffy and delicious and toasts well and is the correct type of bread for pizza toast regardless. To start with, I made my own using this recipe from King Arthur Bread.

My initial assumption was that to make this pizza “toast” we should be starting with toast rather than untoasted bread. But when you’re toasting bread under the broiler, you need to watch it carefully.

So starting with some toast that I didn’t burn, I tried 2 different variations. One with pizza sauce from a jar, the other with plain old ketchup. I used both onions and peppers with the pizza sauce, and green pepper only for the ketchup.

I topped the pizza sauce with mozzarella cheese and salami, and the ketchup with white American cheese and peppersoni.

Neither version looked particularly pizza-ish coming out from under the broiler.

Additionally, cutting them into pieces was difficult. Cooking renders the fat from both salami and pepperoni, making them much tougher to slice through. Cutting into squares let me avoid that issue with the pepperoni for the most part, but attempting to cut through the salami resulted in compressing the center of the bread somewhat.

After disappointing results with the broiler, and recalling Craig Mod’s line that pizza toast is “a hug produced in a toaster oven,” I acquired one. It’ll be good to have, right?

If nothing else, it’ll toast things pretty evenly, right?

*sigh* For this version, I tried mixing pizza sauce with ketchup, and mixed in a bit of Japanese Worcestershire sauce as well.

Once again I combined this with green pepper, mozzarella cheese, and salami

Then I put it back into the toaster oven on the broil setting to finish the top.

The bread… got a bit dark again. But I did get some nice browning on the cheese around the edges.

Once again, the salami proved difficult to cut through. And eating the toast whole without cutting into it is not a solution–it simply results in the salami being dragged off the top of the stack, pulling 400° cheese and sauce onto one’s chin (one of the many occasions in life on which I am glad to have a beard).

Surely the Kissaten chefs have a solution for this? It turns out yes, though not universally. One of the first examples of pizza toast Craig Mod ran into on his walk across Japan was impressively engineered for ease of separation. And it sounds an awful lot like they start with the bread untoasted. You live and you learn.

The bread is first cut into long thirds. Each of those “fingers” is then slightly scored on the bottom into shallow thirds. The crust on the outer edges of two of the fingers is cut eighty percent of the way off–not entirely, but mostly.

First, though, I’d need some more bread–I used mine up already. So I went to Arlington Heights, and I bought both a 1/3 loaf of shokupan from my preferred bakery, Crescent, which only sells their shokupan in 1/3 loaf increments. And I bought a whole loaf of shokupan from Pastry House Hippo in Mitsuwa, ’cause they’ll sell you all the damn bread you can carry.

While at Mitsuwa, I looked for a Japanese brand of tomato sauce to use instead of the more Italian pizza sauce I had been using. I settled for a Japanese brand of ketchup, sold in a plastic-wrapped squeeze bottle very much like Kewpie mayonnaise.

I used provolone cheese this time, tearing pieces from multiple slices to cover the bread as completely as possible. I also cut the salami into quarters so they would separate more easily after cooking.

After 5 minutes or so on the “toast” setting of the toaster oven, my pizza toast was ready. It looked great, though to get the onions and green peppers to pull apart successfully I still had to slice down on them. Less pretty but more functional.

And so served this pizza toast with some dark-roasted French press coffee, with cream and sugar, on a beat-up old wooden table, to try and recreate at least a little of the lived-in, wabi-sabi aesthetic of many of the Kissaten Craig Mod encountered on his walk.

The pieces weren’t quite as easy to separate as I’d anticipated–see the blooper reel at the end of the Tiktok video below for proof–but it worked. I suppose if I had been running a Kissaten for years I’d probably have the process down to a science. The version in the video, made with American cheese instead of provolone, was slightly better–the saltiness of the American cheese played better against the sweetness of the ketchup than the milder provolone did. Both were satisfying though, the sour, salty salami with the mild sweetness of the cooked onion and green pepper, the cheese and the ketchup, all supported by the crisp-edged but still pillowy-firm shokupan.

@sandwichidiot Kissaten and Tell: Japan's Pizza Toast #pizzatoast #sandwichtribunal ♬ original sound – Jim Behymer

Maybe one day I will get to Japan–there are plenty of reasons to want to visit there. Maybe on that trip I will wander into a Kissaten, if any still exist. Maybe that Kissaten will offer pizza toast and I’ll finally get to try the real thing. In the meantime, a toaster oven is a more reasonable expense.