Harry Kersh: From calorie count to portion sizes,
we wanted to find out all the differences
between Pizza Hut in the UK and the US.
This is "Food Wars."
Joe Avella: At a Pizza Hut in the US,
the pizza size that you want to get
is often dictated by the type of crust you want to get.
For instance, this right here
is the smallest you can get, 6 inches,
but you can only get it with the pan crust.
Harry: In the UK, our pizzas come in three sizes.
Firstly, we have the small.
[crickets chirping]
OK, so they didn't actually
have a small pizza when we went,
because they said that no one orders them
and if they do they normally just give them mediums.
However, a small is supposed to be 9 inches across.
Joe: In the US, at a Pizza Hut,
the only small pizza you can get
is one with gluten-free crust.
This one here is 10 inches.
Harry: The next size we have in the UK
is the medium pizza.
This one is 11 inches across.
Joe: The large you also get in the hand-tossed,
the pan,
or the thin and crispy crust.
This one: 14 inches.
Harry: Pizza Hut in the UK also offers
an all-in-one pan box meal,
where you can get a large pizza of your choice
as well as two sides and two sauces.
Joe: Here in the US,
you can get two box meal options.
This first one is a medium pizza,
five breadsticks, and some dipping sauce,
and then 10 cinnamon sticks with dipping icing.
And it comes in one box?
That really helps when you're eating this
in your car by yourself.
[laughing]
Not big enough, you say?
Don't worry. Pizza Hut has got you and the family covered.
This is the big dinner box.
Ooh, man!
[laughing] Look at this, dude!
It's like opening the suitcase in "Pulp Fiction."
[angelic music]
This looks awesome!
You got two pizzas.
I got pepperoni, and I got sausage.
10 cheese sticks, and you get an option
of either pasta or chicken wings.
Get real. Get wings.
Joe: In the UK, we got these ones from a restaurant,
and they gave us a portion of six barbecue wings.
Joe: Not to be outdone,
we went ahead and proved a point to no one
by going just a little bit further
with our wing size options.
You can get six,
you can get 12,
you can get 18,
or 36.
[upbeat tuba music]
Lemon pepper?
Nope, I don't like that.
Harry: Who's getting the better deal for their money?
Well, in the UK,
a large cheese pizza will cost you 15 pounds 99.
That's a price of 15 cents per square inch.
Joe: The US large hand-tossed cheese pizza
is about $13.99,
which is about 9 cents per square inch,
making it about 40% cheaper
than the same pizza in the UK.
Harry: So, here we have
a large classic-crust cheese pizza
and a large pan-crust cheese pizza.
Now, these are the same price and the same diameter.
We wanted to find out
which one gives you more pizza for your money,
so what we're going to do
is try and weigh equivalent slices
and see which one comes out on top.
Joe: All right.
We will weigh a large slice ourselves.
Harry: So, Pizza Hut large pizzas in the UK
are supposed to be cut into 10 slices,
but they've actually cut this into eight,
so what we're going to do is try and find the slices
that are the same size, for scientific accuracy.
Let's weigh a slice of classic crust cheese
and see what it comes to.
Now let's weigh the pan crust.
So, our equivalent-size slice of pan pizza
is about 103 grams.
Joe: Similarly here in the US,
this is the hand-tossed, this is the pan,
both large cheese.
Pan.
So, one slice of pan is about 125 grams.
Hm.
Do the next one.
Slice is almost the exact same size.
80 grams.
That's, like, significantly less pizza.
Same price. Ah, yeah. Stick with the pan.
Look how thick that is versus this.
Harry: In the UK, a large pan pizza
should be cut into 10 slices, but ours is eight.
Assuming it was 10 slices,
each slice would be 226 calories,
and that brings the total for a large pan
to 2,260 calories.
Joe: In the US, our pizzas apparently
are all eight slices regardless of size,
so one slice of a large pan Pizza Hut pizza
is 360 calories,
making the entire pie 2,880 calories.
Harry: One of these also contains 99 grams of fat
as well as 3,400 milligrams of sodium.
Joe: This entire pizza also has about 135 grams of fat.
54 of those are saturated fat,
which I'm certain is the bad fat.
And it also has 5.31 grams of sodium.
That, in case you didn't know,
punch in,
is 221% of your daily sodium intake.
Don't eat this all in one day.
Harry: It's got 100% of your daily flavor in it.
What about the most calorific thing on the menu?
Well, in the UK, that's a large stuffed crust
pepperoni feast.
If it is 10 slices, each slice is 292 calories,
bringing the total to 2,920.
One of these pizzas contains
more than double your daily sodium allowance
and more than triple your saturated fat allowance.
Joe: If you want to have even more calories in your pizza,
then you've got to go with the most calorific pizza
on the Pizza Hut menu,
and, thank you, Conner,
that is, of course, the meat lovers.
This entire thing is
3,760 calories.
400% of your daily saturated fat.
400!
And it also is three times your daily sodium.
If I've not put a fine enough point on it,
don't eat this.
Harry: Here's everything in a pan-pizza base
from a UK Pizza Hut.
Wheat flour, water,
yeast (baker's yeast, rehydrating agent E190),
vegetable rapeseed oil, salt,
premix (salt, calcium sulphate,
emulsifiers E481,
E472e, E471,
flour-treatment agent E300,
enzyme (alpha amylase, xylanase,
glucose oxidase, protease, cullulase)),
sugar, flour-treatment agent, ascorbic acid E300.
Joe: In the US, our pan dough has enriched flour,
which is bleached wheat flour,
malted barley flour, niacin,
furious sulfate?
Don't mess with that sulfate. He's pissed.
Thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin,
folic acid; water, yeast.
It contains 2% or less of salt, soybean oil,
vital wheat gluten, sugar,
enzymes, ascorbic acid,
sodium stearoyl lass-ih-tight.
Lac-the-lite.
I think it's lac-the-lite.
Harry: Now, the UK list might actually look worse,
but you shouldn't be too scared of the E numbers.
For the most part, the chemicals actually exist
in the US dough as well
but are referred to by different names.
For example, E481 is just another way of referring to
the sodium stearoyl lactylate.
Also, the E472e that's found in the UK dough
is otherwise known as datem,
and that appears in the US hand-tossed crust.
What about the marinara sauce?
Well, in the UK it contains tomatoes,
citric acid, sugar, oregano,
basil, marjoram, thyme, salt, onion powder,
maltodextrin, yeast extract, rapeseed oil, guar gum,
garlic powder, and silicone dioxide.
Joe: Whereas our sauce contains tomato puree,
which is water and tomato paste,
maltodextrin, salt, spices, garlic powder,
tomato fibers, olive oil, canola oil,
citric acid, and natural flavors,
so it sounds like it's pretty much the same thing.
Harry: How about the cheese?
In the UK, we refer to our cheese as mozzarella,
and it contains the following:
mozzarella cheese, salt,
lactic cultures, and potato starch.
It's actually pretty short, compared to the first two.
Joe: In the US, the Pizza Hut refers to its cheese
as cheese, which contains mozzarella cheese,
pasteurized milk, cheese cultures,
salt, enzymes, modified food starch,
sugarcane fiber, potassium chloride –
[burps]
Excuse me. Ugh!
Natural flavors, ascorbic acid.
Bleh!
Harry: There is one thing to look out for on the menu.
If you're in the US and you get a salad,
the croutons contain azodicarbonamide, or ADA.
This is a substance that's usually used to make
vinyl foam plastics, which form things like yoga mats.
It's actually been banned from use in food
in the UK since the 1990s.
Joe: So, this is my comment on the yoga-mat thing.
It's always something.
Even when we're trying to be healthy,
our salad has yoga-mat plastic in it.
It's ridiculous. Like,
why do our croutons have plastic in them?
Just get regular croutons without plastic!
It doesn't make any sense.
This pizza is the bomb, dude. It's really good.
Harry: Here is everything you can only find on the menu
at a UK Pizza Hut.
And we've got quite a few exclusives!
Joe: And these are all the exclusives you can only get
at a US Pizza Hut.
Harry: So, I'm not sure if it's like this in the US,
but in the UK, Pizza Hut's operations
are kind of split into two halves.
You have a bunch of restaurants,
where you will go and have a sit-down meal,
and then you also have a bunch of carryout locations,
which just do delivery orders.
The menus are actually slightly different,
depending on where you get your food from.
The brown ones are actually from a sit-down restaurant,
and the red ones are from a takeaway restaurant.
We wanted to get a selection of both
to see all of the foods you can get from the UK Pizza Hut.
Joe: Per what Harry was talking about before,
places for carryout versus delivery only,
I have no idea.
I just went on the website and ordered it,
and this showed up, so.
Harry: Let's start with the exclusive pizzas.
So, across these few pizzas, we have pretty much
all of the exclusive customizations available in the UK.
We'll start with some of the doughs.
On the left we have our gluten-free option.
I think there actually is one of these in the US,
but could be fun to compare.
It looks pretty standard from the top.
Then my personal favorite is here,
which is the cheesy-bites crust.
So, instead of just a standard crust,
they get twists of dough and fill them with cheese
and then layer those around the outside.
Here we have a sprinkled, kind of, like, herby,
cheesy situation on the crust.
I've never had this one before.
I think it's quite new.
But it looks and smells pretty good.
And then finally we have a vegan stuffed-crust option,
which is great because you shouldn't
be robbed of extra cheese just for being vegan.
Joe: Right in the center here
is the US exclusive Pizza Hut pizza.
It's shaped like a heart,
and it has all the ingredients you only get in the US.
Went with the creamy garlic Parmesan base, as a sauce.
The crust is a flavored crust,
and I went with the Hut Favorite.
I have no idea what that is.
And exclusive meats I had put on here
was Italian sausage, meatballs, and pork.
Also has banana peppers.
Shaped like a heart.
Why it's all year round
and not just on Valentine's Day is beyond me,
but apparently you can do this.
Harry: Nothing says romance like a heart-shaped pizza.
How do you cut that thing, though?
It seems like getting even slices
out of that would be an absolute nightmare.
Joe: Look what I brought.
All right, so I guess I will just do...
[slicing] [jazzy music]
Right?
Yeah, no, I hate that.
Harry: Now, as is becoming traditional on "Food Wars,"
what we have here is a UK Only pizza.
This is a pizza with the cheesy bites crust,
with vegan pepperphoni, caramelized onions,
and rocket on it.
It's actually not bad.
I'm going to try a cheesy bite as well,
because I feel that's part of the experience.
I think this is the first UK Only creation we've made
that I can actually endorse.
This is actually pretty good.
The vegan pepperoni, I've got to say, is actually good.
The texture is pretty much there.
It's quite salty,
a little bit of spice to it,
and the cheesy bites,
it does make it a little bit harder to hold,
'cause it's like,
what are you supposed to hold on to?
But they themselves are actually really tasty.
So, yeah. Thumbs-up for the UK Only.
Joe: Pizza Hut's most infamous menu item
is their take on the calzone, aka the P'Zone.
P, apostrophe, Z, O, N, E.
I have had a P'Zone before.
They're actually really good.
I was really bummed to find out that
where we are filming it, in this part of the United States,
the Los Angeles, California, area,
Went on the internet,
unfortunately, the P'Zone is not available.
Went on the internet,
and sure enough the P'Zone is available,
at least in Saint Louis and at least in Cincinnati,
so if anyone watching in the United States
would like to ship me a P'Zone
from their P'Zone-plentiful part
of the United States, please do.
Um,
I don't know how I'd get you my address.
[laughs]
Harry: Now, as you can see,
we have a bunch of exclusive sides in the UK.
I'm not entirely sure what all of these are,
because some of them look very similar,
so we'll have a run-through
and I'll try and point out the ones I can identify.
So, at the back here, we've got some potato wedges.
I'm never really sure why restaurants offer potato wedges,
because to me they're just worse than fries
in pretty much every metric.
Then we've got a bunch of different chicken options.
We've got these chicken-strip things here,
we've got these spicy-looking nugget things,
we've got these herby-looking nugget things,
and then we've got some plain-looking nugget things,
as well as these, I think, Southern fried bites.
Apologies to actual Southern Americans,
because I'm sure they are an abomination.
Joe: Here in America, we have something called WingStreet.
From what I understand, WingStreet was a separate business,
or a separate restaurant chain,
that is owned by the same brand,
and therefore you can get WingStreet wings
when you order from Pizza Hut.
Anyway, we have a bunch of different sauce options,
like we have a honey barbecue,
Buffalo, which can be mild or medium or burning hot,
garlic Parmesan, and, of course...
what was this one that I hate?
Conner: Lemon pepper.
Joe: Lemon pepper, which I don't like.
You can also get a Hawaiian teriyaki, a spicy garlic,
a Cajun-style dry rub,
or you can just get these bad boys naked.
Oof! Worst time to burp there.
Harry: Why do all the WingStreet containers
look like Death Stars?
That seems like a suboptimal way to transport your food.
It's like a half-bowl,
and the lid is like another bowl.
Joe: Sauce talk.
Deep voice: Sauce talk!
Joe: You can also get exclusive sauces on the side,
for instance, blue cheese.
You can get yourself some ranch,
a cup of marinara,
and the Buffalo sauces of various temperatures,
honey barbecue sauce.
Sides of sauces. We've got you covered.
Harry: Outside of that, we've got some nachos.
We've also got these cheesy bites,
which are just triangles of cheese
that get breaded and deep-fried,
because I guess cholesterol isn't a thing anymore.
We've also got some onion rings,
we've got some corncobs,
we have cheesy garlic bread,
regular garlic bread,
and we also have mac 'n' cheese,
but it turns out...
you can also do that with mac 'n' cheese.
Joe: Also, WingStreet fries,
just orders of fries that it looks like you can get
pretty much the same flavors as the wings.
I'm going to toss them in the same sauce.
Here's a lemon pepper.
Ugh, not as good.
I don't like lemon pepper, I'm finding out.
Something I thought every Pizza Hut around the world had,
apparently not, are breadsticks.
Looks like five sticks.
Harry: Joe, we went over this in the Papa John's episode.
That is not a breadstick.
Joe: And you can also get cheesy bread,
which is like breadsticks,
but they bake them with cheese on top of them.
This is the chicken Alfredo.
[laughs]
Is this just how they packed it?
There's a Buffalo sauce
and a barbecue sauce in here. Why?
These guys right here,
I'm probably going to pronounce them wrong.
Quepapas. Like tater tots?
Yeah!
Harry: We also have a bunch of exclusive desserts
at UK Pizza Huts.
If you're eating at a restaurant, you have a few options,
including one of these brownie slices.
This is actually a vegan vanilla cheesecake,
which looks and smells really good, I've got to say.
And then you have a cookie-dough thing,
which usually comes with
a little scoop of ice cream as well.
Joe: And the desserts. Huh!
We're almost done, people.
The thing right in front of me
are Cinnabon mini buns.
This is the Ultimate Hershey's chocolate chip cookie.
Harry: If you're getting delivery from Pizza Hut in the UK,
there are also some exclusive options.
This is another sort of giant-cookie-dough situation.
Bites of Ben & Jerry's cookie dough.
Again, it's usually served frozen,
but they've now unfortunately defrosted.
And then they have some branded ice creams as well.
Joe: We've got their triple chocolate brownie.
Last but not least.
Cinnamon sticks with a lot of icing.
You know I gotta do it.
[upbeat string music]
[Joe sighs]
Harry: See, I always think that these look like
little tables for mice.
So you could just put the tiny slice on the tiny table.
[laughs]
And have a little mouse dinner party.