Python pizza!
Python pizza!
A Florida pizzeria has an answer to the state's growing wild Myanmarese python problem: eat them.
Evan's Neighborhood Pizza offers an outlandish pie that features the slithering reptile as a topping.
It's called the Everglades and curious carnivores can also get the pie with frog legs and alligator.
Owners Evann and Avis Daniell concocted the idea a couple of years ago as news that Burmese pythons were invading the Everglades was just becoming well known.
Since the reptiles were becoming such a nuisance, why not just start putting them on a pizza?
'I'm very adventurous when it comes to food, that's for sure,' Evan Daniell, 52, told the New York Daily News.
Evan got to working and came up with the Everglades pie: an eclectic mix of ingredients found in the nearby wetlands.
The most exotic among those ingredients is the python, which Daniell says is so gamey it must be marinated.
Only slightly less weird are the frog legs, which are much cleaner-tasting even than chicken according to the pizza maker.
A blend of alligator and spicy sausage finishes off the meat trifecta.
'You have different flavors throughout each bite,' says Daniell.
Adding some roughage to the pie is swamp cabbage--which is a type of hearts of palm--and tomato.
'It's a happy accident, it's about being creative,' says Daniell.
Daniell estimates he has sold roughly 150 pies in the last two years.
'We're selling them left and right,' he says.
Following the pie's success, Daniell says he like to offer a roadkill pizza featuring raccoon, armadillo and even possum meat.
But, alas, 'I've yet to find a supplier,' he said.
Daniell says its mostly tourists who want to try the pizza as a sort of 'When in Rome,' meal.
The novelty comes at a price: a medium Everglades pie costs $45 owing to the python costing a whopping $66 per pound.