Kimchi Pizza With Salami, Tomato-Miso Sauce

Blogging is a lot of work and takes good organizational skills. And it’s a lot of fun too!

I publish on average two to three posts a week and in order to stay consistent, I always have a few posts that are ready to go live at the push of a button. I schedule posts a few weeks in advance and have folders filled with recipes that have already been shot. 

But sometimes, when I get really excited about a new dish I have created, I move it ahead of all the other recipes and click publish as soon as I can. When I made this kimchi pizza with salami and miso tomatoes, I knew I had something special and couldn’t wait to share it with you! Kimchi pizza with a savory and sweet miso tomato sauce? It’s the bomb!

It took all of 20 minutes to make and bake this kimchi pizza and the result was simply amazing! This kimchi pizza has the perfect balance of sweet, salty, savory with a touch of heat, and is overall very healthy (aside from the salami, which you can omit or replace with your favorite vegetable).

I used whole wheat organic crust that I brushed with extra virgin olive oil, and a mix of sake and miso paste. Then I topped it with salami, red onions, spinach, fresh shiitake mushrooms, cherry tomatoes, mozzarella and of course, plenty of kimchi!

The idea of making a kimchi pizza came to me after watching the Food Network… Or was it The Cooking Channel? I don’t remember exactly but I saw something about a lady who owns a pizzeria in Chicago and uses kimchi in her pizzas. The seed was planted in my brain and I began experimenting with pizza and kimchi in my own kitchen. It would have been easy to simply add kimchi to a regular classic pizza but then it would just be a classic pizza with kimchi.

Umm…No.

I wanted to bring Asian flavors to the forefront and finish on a classic note – like a Japanese/Korean/Italian/American pizza.

So I added fresh shiitake mushrooms instead of button mushrooms. That was easy and it totally worked. Next I had to find a replacement for tomato sauce.

Miso paste? Sure that sounded great but too much miso could potentially ruin or overpower the pungent taste of kimchi. So I made one of my favorite flavor combinations; cherry tomatoes tossed in sake and awase (or white) miso paste. Who knew tomatoes and miso went so well together! I use this combo on everything: I put it on baked avocados, eat it with kabocha squash and nori, and use it in my vegetarian chirashizushi recipe. And now it’s gone into my kimchi pizza and it’s nom nom once again!

I don’t know if it was luck or good planning but the flavors married beautifully AND the taste of kimchi was most prominent. I created a Korean kimchi pizza with a Japanese miso based sauce, topped with Italian salami over a pizza crust that’s made in Brooklyn. A Korean/Japanese/Italian/American Pizza! Slam dunk!

So now that I have made a kimchi pizza, easy cucumber kimchi and a kimchi soup, what else could I make using kimchi? What do you think?

Leave me suggestions in the comment section and I’ll see if I can cook something up for you!

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