Random Picture #99

There are lots of weird cookies sold all over the world. I don't imagine that Japan has the market cornered on such things, but I do see more of them sold in Tokyo than I ever saw back home. In the U.S., usually weird things were so regional that you couldn't get them unless you went to some place which claimed to be "the capital of (food type)". For instance, I bet you can get cheese-flavored ice cream in Wisconsin or cajun cookies in New Orleans, but neither would be sold in shops in big cities. 

These red onion langue du chat (cat's tongue) cookies are from Hokkaido. It seems that everything odd that I find here is from Hokkaido. Though I thought at first that they might be just shaped like onions, my research seems to indicate they are savory cookies with spices that compliment onion flavor and have a cheese cream sandwiching them together. They are shown served with wine. I wasn't really tempted, not because they aren't interesting, but because I didn't feel like paying 600 yen ($9.14) for a box of 6 of something that I am not at all sure is going to be tasty.

Bourbon Petit Mame Ring Snack

When I was a kid, I had the experience that so many children are familiar with in which my mother said I couldn't leave the table until I ate my vegetables. In my case, that vegetable was peas. I'm actually pretty open-minded about vegetables in general and will sample, if not eat and enjoy, nearly anything except peas. Oh sure, I'll eat a random pea in a dish full of other items, but I'd never seek out pea soup or buy peas and eat them straight up. My mother made sure that I would forever hate peas by making me sit there until I ate mushy, salty, disgusting canned peas. I don't remember if I gave in, but my distinct impression was that I won rather than my mother or the peas.

In light of that, it is odd that I'd look upon this sleeve of pea-driven salted snacks and decide that, "yes, I will buy this." Trust me when I say that this is in no way some valiant effort to overcome my vegetable traumas from childhood but rather my careless consideration of the Japanese and addled confusion. I read "mame", but my brain "heard" "edamame" (immature soybeans). It also doesn't hurt that this has a picture of a yuzu fruit and the characters for yuzu pepper written on it. I'm a bit nutty for yuzu, as future and past reviews will reveal. 

These smell very "beany", which is no surprise since they are pea-based and the first ingredient is "endo powder" or pea powder. The flavor is comes in layers, and that is always a good thing. The chips are quite tiny and feel very cool on the tongue and you experience the pea flavor first. That is followed by the almost vinegary sourness of the yuzu and finally a slightly peppery kick. I love it when a pedestrian snack has depth of flavor as this does. So often, cheap snacks such as this about 90-yen ($1.17) 39-gram (1.4 oz.) sleeve, rely mainly on crunchiness, greasiness, and salt to make the consumer happy. This has quite a bit more going for it. 

I am very attracted in general to Bourbon's Petit line of snacks because of the size, portability and variety and this really is one of the better options for salted snacks that they have offered. The only issue I have with these is that they do have a distinct "Pringles" texture going for them as they are the sort of chip that is pressed together and then fried. It also is pretty fatty and packs 226 calories into this small amount. As long as you don't fool yourself into thinking that pea-based chips are more nutritious than potato ones though, you're going to be okay with that.

Sonton Peanut Soft

This review marks a personal first for me; it is the first time I've gone into a store to buy something and found myself crying in the snack aisle. No, there hasn't been a marked increase in the price of chocolate (yet) nor did they take away some much-loved snack. If you read my other blog first, you may already know why. I stood in front of the shelf with rows of sleeved Bourbon petit snacks and saw the kinako wafers (which are heavenly) and thought about the fact that my days of being able to casually peruse and purchase such snacks are now greatly numbered. That's right, gentle readers, I'm leaving Japan.

A deeper explanation is on my 1000 Things blog, but the bottom line is that my husband and I are going on March 29 and don't anticipate returning. Of course, "never say never" is a very good motto, but our plans are not to return. For my other blog, this doesn't mean much as memories are as good as being here in constructing those posts. For this blog, the future is quite a bit more difficult to predict as I peer into my Japan-related crystal ball. I'd like to continue sampling and writing about Japanese snacks, but I have no way of knowing at this time what the availability of such things will be upon my return. This is, in large part, because I'm not even sure where I'll be living beyond the state I ultimately plan to be in (California).

Chances are that I will be making some connections to importers once I am settled. Immediately after I return, my address will not be known since where I reside depends on things I can't be certain of yet (like what university my husband enters). At the very least, I should be able to answer questions about how to get snacks outside of Japan more effectively once I am in a position of having to do so myself. At the very worst, well, I guess I won't be able to carry on with this blog at all, but I'm going to try and think positive. I hope to carry on and hope that, if there is a hiatus while I pull my new life together, that my readers will be patient with me. In the meantime, here's the actual review:

Awhile back, I negatively reviewed something called "Peanut Cream" by Sonton. I wanted to give one of the Peanut Soft versions sold in many Japanese markets a try, but I wanted to try a different brand as one of the commenters mentioned that Sonton was the worst. Unfortunately, my local market only stocked this brand in peanut flavor so I paid my 268 yen ($3.52) and decided to take my chances. 

These tubs of softly whipped cream come in a variety of flavors and right next to this one was a peanut/kinako combo that I nearly bought instead of the straight up peanut variety. I decided that I'd rather go for something that my husband might be willing to eat as well because I've got two months left in Japan and 190 grams (6.7 oz.) of this is a bit much for one person to polish off in a short time, especially when each tablespoon is packing 95 calories. That makes it slightly more energy dense than peanut butter and the ingredients make it a lot less healthy. The primary components of this "peanut soft" are peanut butter, sugar, and shortening. This is junk food pure and simple.

As for how it tastes... Well, it's heaven on a spoon. It's sweet, soft, light, and has a nice peanut flavor. It's like peanut butter that is actually "buttery". The fatty texture on the tongue is most gratifying and the sweetness just a nudge away from cloying. The good part about it is that you don't have to use a lot to be satisfied. The bad part is that it's so good that you may want to be gluttonous about it. This is a treat to be enjoyed in moderation, rather like Nutella in terms of how controlled you are about eating it, not so much in terms of flavor.

Sometimes you can buy bread in bakeries in Japan that are spread with peanut cream and this is what they are spread with. I've had such bread given to me before and it is wickedly awesome. I don't buy it myself usually, but now I know that I can "make it" any time if I have a tub of this around. If you see it and want to indulge and throw caution about nutrition to the wind, I can't recommend this highly enough. 

Random Picture #98

Click to see a much larger version. My set includes yuzu koshoo sauce, cream-infused tofu, and red miso soup. 

Tonkatsu, or fried pork cutlet, is a staple in many Japanese restaurants. These cutlets are folded into many types of dishes including Japanese-style curry and even sandwiches. It is part of adapted Western cuisine, which makes many Japanese people believe that this is what we non-Japanese folks are eating day-in and day-out and making ourselves fat with. The truth is that I never ate anything like this back home, though that  may reflect a general dislike of fried food.

Tonkatsu varies wildly in quality and some of it can be downright abysmal. Most of it is a slab of pork (like a pork chop) coated in breading and deep fried. Genkatsu is a chain of shops which offers up very thinly sliced layers of domestic pork which are juicy and light (and probably really bad for you, but one has to live a little occasionally). They even have an English menu for tourists, though the awesome set lunch, with customized sauce, side dish, and miso soup type for around $15, isn't listed on it. Tonkatsu is one of the most Western-friendly types of food in Japan with unique Japanese touches often offered on the side and generally bottomless bowls of rice, refills galore of oolong tea, and endless helpings of cabbage to boot. If you're coming here for a vacation, it's definitely worth a try.

Luna Midnight Sweets Mont Blanc

No, I didn't wait 3 months to try this. This is an older picture of the product.

Would you like to know what invention would make a person the wealthiest person in the world? Create a food that tastes like something almost universally loved and create an extremely low calorie or no calorie version. The person who could manage this would solve the biggest of first world problems, how to eat and eat and eat what you love without getting fat.

While no one has created this magical product, food companies keep trying to pander to this desire. This yogurt is one such product as it shows a richly piled chestnut paste sweet on the front as an empty promise of sweet, rich, fatty dessert for a handful of calories (and 100 yen/$1.30). I, at least, am dumb enough to keep hoping that some day I'll be able to enjoy things without paying the price is thigh expansion.

Anything which carries the "mont blanc" moniker has a very high bar to leap over in my opinion. I adore chestnut anything and this particular dessert is something I'm always tempted by when I pass by a patisserie. When I leave Japan, it is something I will absolutely miss. I can only hope that, during the 23 years I've been away, someone back home will have produced their version of this treat for the American market. No, I'm not holding my breath.

Peeling back to the foil reveals an encouraging sight. There are little bits of chestnut mixed into the yogurt. The flavor is definitely that of sweet yogurt, but there's also a good amount of chestnut flavor mixed in. It's not exactly like tucking into a pile of chestnut cream piped on top of a pastry, but it's still pretty satisfying. The yogurt is thin and I think the experience of eating it would be more impressive if it were thicker. Of course, the appeal of this line of sweets is that it's low calorie (65 calories for 110 grams, or a little over half a cup) so any thickness would likely be accomplished by adding artificial thickeners.

I enjoyed this, and I'm glad that it's spending a fair amount of time on the shelves of my local convenience stores. If you're a chestnut fan and aren't put off by very sweet yogurt (or artificial sweeteners), I'd definitely recommend this as a "dessert yogurt". You could do much, much worse, both nutritionally and in terms of the quality.

Lotte Fresh Chocolate Yukimi Daifuku Ice Cream

Remember on Monday when I said winter is the time for chocolate? That applies to ice cream, too, though I'm guessing that this is not due to a lack of refrigeration in the supply trucks as I speculated about other types of chocolate snacks in the previous post. Maybe chocolate is a winter food because it tends to make you fat if you eat a lot of it and being fatter when it's cold provides much needed insulation and padding on the posterior for those who park themselves under the kotatsu for warmth.

The fact that all of the chocolate comes out to play in winter coupled with the fact that it's about a million degrees and there is sauna-like humidity in summer make me feel that, if you're going to come to Tokyo, winter is definitely the time. Sure, if you're a big sissy about a little chill in the air, you might find it less than optimal, but the chocolate, which all appears to be marketed as "limited edition" is worth wearing a scarf and bringing a big coat along.

Yukimi daifuku is a dollop of ice cream (or sometimes, ice milk) wrapped in a thin mochi (pounded rice cake) shell. The mochi is stretchy and fairly flavorless and provides a nice textural contrast to the soft, creamy ice cream. These are usually sold for about 100 yen ($1.24) for two small (47 ml.) balls of mochi-wrapped ice cream. The outside is dusted with flour or starch to keep them from sticking to the packaging, but it has no effect on the eating experience. Each is 92 calories and I split this with my husband. They are best when you allow them to sit for several minutes to allow the ice cream to soften a bit. That reveals more of the creamy nature and for a better texture.

The chocolate flavor comes mostly from the dollop of bittersweet syrup at the top/bottom of the little ball of ice cream. The mochi is brown, but doesn't seem to have any more flavor than standard mochi (which is to say, very little). The flavor is very good with a deepness to the chocolate that you don't always find in cheap consumer-grade ice cream. The unique part, of course, is the outer wrapper which adds a lovely textural quality. Lotte has a technique for keeping the mochi soft while still being frozen which makes this very similar to eating fresh daifuku.

This is my second encounter with Lotte's daifuku ice cream and it did not disappoint. My previous experience was with the vanilla variety which left a very favorable impression on me. This one similarly did so and I am keen to try all flavors on offer through time. If you have an Asian grocery that stocks these or live in Japan, don't hesitate to try these. They are delicious, unique, and provide excellent portion control.

Random Picture #97

There is an unintentional theme to this week and it is winter and chocolate. One of the most awesome ones is Meltykiss. Since these are so, well, melty, they only come out when the temperature gets cool enough for naked snuggling under the covers to induce desirable warmth instead of sticky sweatiness. This bin shows three flavors - chocolate, strawberry, and green tea. Several of my students have told me this is their favorite chocolate. I've had only the chocolate ones, but I'd wager that all of these are the bee's knees of truffle-like chocolate delight.

Winter Kuchidoke Pocky

For an interview on Japanese snacks that I did quite some time ago, I was asked about seasonal variations in Japan. At that time, I had a bit less of a handle on it than I do now, but there are certain very predictable offerings based on the time of year. In spring, the cherry flavors come out to play as a way of saying, "cherry blossoms are coming, so please enjoy them with this fake-flavored confectionary." In autumn, sweet potato and chestnut offer their warm and toasty joys. In summer, we usually get lemon parading as something "cool" though I generally fail to see why "sour" equals "cool". In a similar vein, I don't know why winter is the season for chocolate aside from the fact that it's the best time of year for manufacturers to ship it without fear of melting. If so, there is something very disheartening about the notion that flavor offerings are tied the ability to properly air condition vehicles and shops.

Fortunately, regardless of the time of year, many of the chocolate offerings in winter are rich and deep. In the past, there has been a kuchidoke KitKat that was quite the tasty offering. For those who don't go back and read the explanation on that old post, "kuchidoke" means "melt in your mouth". I'm not sure how you're supposed to achieve that with a Pocky stick, unless you suck on it like a lollipop instead of bite off the bland pretzel stick pieces and chew them up, but I can say that these are somewhat more heavily coated sticks than the basic Pocky. They are reminiscent of "Dessert Pocky", but not quite that overloaded with sweet swaddling.

There are four packets of 6 sticks in a box. I'm not sure what the retail price is because my husband won these for me in a UFO Catcher machine, but I'd guess they're around 160 yen ($2.07) based on the average price of a non-basic box of Pocky. Each packet has 125 calories so it's a pretty economical snack option if you limit yourself.

I'm not a giant fan of Pocky in general, as I've mentioned before. As a matter of fact, this review mainly exists as a testimonial to my husband's spirt of competition when it comes to gaming machines and his good eye-hand coordination. It's not that I dislike them, but just there are other things that are generally more attractive to me (like Pucca, which is like an inverted Pocky). That doesn't mean that they aren't tasty snacks, but just that tastes vary and if you're faced with a row of corn chips, potato chips, tortilla chips and rice crackers, one of them is going to be your first option even though each one of them has its appeal. 

All of that being said, these are some damn fine Pocky. The flavor hit is two-fold with a mild chocolate flavor up front and a fudgey, deep chocolate bottom that hits you at the end of a bite. If I didn't know what "kuchidoke" actually meant, I'd believe it meant, delicious, intense, non-dark chocolate as that does appear to be how it is presented. The box shows you that the outside of each stick is coated with cocoa powder, but I don't believe that is where these get their flavor punch from. I think it's from coffee powder being put in the mix to boost the intensity.

If I were a Pocky fan, these would definitely get a "very happy" rating and I'd be stocking up on extra boxes to enjoy some when they disappear as a seasonal release. Since I'm not a Pocky nut, these will get a "happy" rating. When my husband won these, he got three boxes taped together and I have no regrets about having so many to eat, but I'm not sure that these will make it into my steady rotation. That's simply because they're Pocky, not because they aren't excellent Pocky.

Morinaga Yuzu-cha

There is a tendency among those who are not native to a culture to take assertions from media as if the natives are taking them at face value. This tea, for instance, is marketed as something which is meant to help conserve energy in these days of nuclear-disaster-induced cutbacks (setsuden). Of course, it seems that winter isn't really a big time of year for setsuden as most trains, shops, and homes are heated to within a few degrees of the temperature on the surface of the sun, but the concept of saving power lingers in the hearts and minds of PR folks all over Japan.

When I read Morinaga's PR site about this product and the other variations that are on offer (cocoa and ginger tea), I thought, "boy, the Japanese sure are gullible if they think they'll heat less water using this type of instant tea as compared to making it themselves." I'm  making the common assumption that the Japanese aren't rolling their eyes at the ludicrous notion that they will heat less water to dissolve a brick of pre-made yuzu stuff than if they simply stir yuzu marmalade into the same amount of hot water. So often, this is the root of a lot of erroneous cultural beliefs. If the media says it, the Japanese must believe it 100%, right? After all, we believe it when commercials tell us that Pop-Tarts and Sugar-frosted flakes are "a good part of a nutritious breakfast". 

As an enormous fan of yuzu, a flavorful citrus fruit which is a cross between a grapefruit, a lemon, and an orange in taste, it may surprise my readers to learn that I had no idea that it was used to make tea.  I've been seeing enormous jars of yuzu marmalade on sale at local grocers and thinking that it looked like a tasty option for my morning repast, but the volume was such that I'd have to eat it everyday for a couple of months to get through it. It was only after buying this rather expensive (198 yen/$2.58) bag of a mere 4 half-cup servings of tea and doing some research that I learned that people are plopping spoons of it into mugs of hot water.

This caught my eye at a local supermarket, Inageya, as I was heading for the register. Most instant tea and coffee in Japan is chock-full of sugar and high calorie, but this weighs in at a modest 29 calories per serving. I don't often feel truly excited about trying a new snack these days, but I was quite enthused about this. It did not disappoint.

As the instructions say, I removed a brick from its foil package and added 100 ml. (1/2 cup) of hot water. The brick fizzed up in a way that would make an Alka-Seltzer fanatic happy and settled in to make an intense yellow tea with bits of peel floating around in it. The smell is of heavenly citrus, unsurprisingly, and though this is called "tea", it has no leaves of the common tea plant (Camellia sinensis) in it. It is mainly yuzu and sugar in its purest form, but as this instant variety it has artificial sweeteners, potato starch and other unsavory chemicals to create the tidy little fizzing brick.

The taste of this is very intense and sweet. It packs a wallop in terms of both zest and a bracing sugariness. I can see how this would be the perfect pick-me-up after a walk in the brisk winter air and it would probably really help wake you up if you're tired. It's  not something that I could see relaxing and casually sipping at, but rather a slow drink that you take sips of and savor. Personally, I thought it was incredible, but I can see where others may find it too strong or too sweet. 

My guess is that it'd be vastly more economical and possibly even tastier to make the tea from a jar of marmalade rather than these instant packets. One of these days (very soon), I'll buy a jar and try the real deal for comparison. However, if you've never had yuzu tea and just want to try it, this is a good way to sample a small amount rather than invest in a big jar of marmalade (and I've only seen relatively big ones). Also, if you want something to keep in a back-pack or a desk drawer, this would be the bee's knees. I can definitely see buying this again, though I frankly wish it were a bit cheaper.