Earlier this year, Erik was lamenting not eating hamburgers anymore because he missed making teriyaki burgers. So I suggested – why not just make turkey teriyaki burgers instead? And thus Erik got his burgers back. And we enjoyed some really yummy turkey burgers this summer. I had never had a teriyaki burger before, but Erik was raving about them so much, obviously now I wanted to have one too. And guys, they’re really good. They’re like your favorite stir-fry in burger form. So when the discussion for this month’s Pizza Lab rolled around something capturing our summer of turkey burgers seemed appropriate. We fully intended to make this pizza as a bit of a last hurrah to summer, much as the month of September itself is. Unfortunately time got the better of us and we ended up making this pizza on the first day of autumn. But it’s the thought that counts right?

Pizzas and burgers have been combined before, though usually it’s the other way around. I’ve seen various restaurants offer “pizza burgers” which generally consist of a burger topped with tomato sauce and mozzarella cheese. This time we brought the burger to the pizza. Sometimes our Pizza Lab ideas require some serious brainstorming to figure out, but this one was pretty easy. Obviously the pizza dough would stand in for the bun and the rest is just all the ingredients for a teriyaki burger.

The sauce in this case was (drum roll please….) teriyaki sauce. We cooked it down to make it more glaze-like than the bottled stuff, since for one, that’s what you do for teriyaki burgers, and two, it would have just been too liquid-y otherwise.

Next we added pineapple rings, since the pineapples go on the bottom bun for the burger. It is very important to thoroughly drain/pat dry your pineapples before putting them on your pizza (we may or may not have found that out the hard way).

For the meat we contemplated making little mini turkey burgers, but that would have taken a long time and also probably would have just ended up looking like meatballs. So instead we just cooked it up in the pan with the usual turkey burger seasonings.  I think we ended up with a better distribution of the meat this way anyway.

After the meat was done we cooked down some onion, eventually adding in some of the teriyaki sauce.

The whole thing was topped with pepper jack cheese. Now with regular teriyaki burgers you don’t usually add cheese, but since this was a pizza, cheese was necessary. The pepper jack added a nice little extra kick without overpowering any of the other flavors.

This pizza accomplished pretty much everything we wanted it to. It tasted like a teriyaki burger, just in a slightly more horizontal form than usual. And it satisfied our craving for one more bite of summer.  We had originally intended to have this be a grilled pizza, but since it was already very dark out by the time we started making it, decided against it this time.  We will probably grill it the next time we make it though, which I’m sure will help make it even more summer-y.

Rating:

Asian American Italian Fusion Summertime Goodness