Banana Curry Pizza – a Swedish favorite that puts Pizza Hawaii to shame!

In Sweden, most people like to throw everything they can get our hands on on a piece of pizza dough and, although you certainly can get a regular Margherita and other traditional pizzas, there are other…common toppings.
If you thought pineapple-topped Hawaii pizza, in some version enriched also with delicious ham, was a culinary crime, wait until you hear about Sweden’s take on the iconic Italian-born staple: a pizza topped with curry, pineapple, and…banana!

Sweden’s fascination with bananas is well documented, but that doesn’t really explain the culinary oddity known as “Tropicana Pizza” or more simply “Swedish Pizza”.
You might recoil in horror when you first see this pizza, but if you like curry and the mix of sweet and salt, probably you might try it.
It’s wildly popular in Sweden, and you’ll find it under “Ordinary or Classic Pizzas” on the menus!

No one knows exactly who came up with the idea for this unusual treat, but according to a 2017 tweet by the Curators of Sweden, an X (former Twitter) account created by the Swedish Institute and VisitSweden, Tropicana pizza was already known as the “most Swedish pizza there is”.
Well, there’s technically no official date on record as to when the banana curry pizza was introduced in Sweden, but there’s an interest in the Pacific in the years after World War II.
Since the 1960s and ’70s, Sweden has had a deep interest in Polynesian flavors, like bananas and pineapple, which were introduced in Swedish cookbooks to inspire home cooks who introduced, for example, deep-fried bananas served with steak or veal, served already from the 1960s at some restaurants.
Bananas also could be served along with ham, as a fancy dish for a Saturday night with the family watching TV while, in the ’70s, a regular dish could be sausage filled with tomatoes, pineapple, mustard and ham.
On the other hand, one especially peculiar dish introduced in the 1970s is a casserole called the Flying Jacob, made with chicken, chili sauce, bacon and bananas, all topped with peanuts.
All because a Swedish air-freight worker by the name of Ove Jacobsson concocted the surprising dish in 1976, when he haphazardly mixed together ingredients to have something to bring to a summer lunch. His neighbors, including Anders Tunberg, the editor of Allt om Mat, or All About Food magazine, enjoyed the hot dish, and his recipe appeared in September 1976 issue of the publication, eventually leading to its nationwide popularity.
And, not by chance, you can find that kind of pizza in Sweden, with chicken, bananas, curry, peanuts, but also pineapple.
The dish could be traced back to the 1980s, because it was in the late ’70s that Sweden experimented with putting pineapple on pizza, and bananas seem like an extension of that.

In any case, for some reason, many Swedes find the combination of curry, pineapple, and banana paired with the smoky, savory flavor of smoked ham irresistible, making banana-topped pizza one of the most popular pizzas in their country.
Fans swear by the unique (delicious) combination of ingredients, and others slamming it as an abomination that should be wiped from the face of the Earth but, as always, it’s a matter of personal taste.

“I’ve had banana curry pizza a few times in Sweden and it’s honestly surprisingly good – weirdly, it’s a lot better than you’d expect!” Andrew Campbell, an American e-sports player who tried banana-topped pizza said.

“No, no, everything about that pizza is delicious apart from the banana. It’s not similar at all to Hawaiian. This is like someone forced a smoothie on a pizza,” BuzzFeed’s Paul added after a taste test. “Pineapple is a delicious treat and this is just banana that’s up in your business for no reason.”

For the curious, it’s fairly easy to find banana curry pizza throughout Sweden and, interestingly, If you go to a Swedish pizza shop, you can probably choose between 70 and 100 different pizzas!

Images from web – Google Research