Garlic Butter Sembei

Thanks to the experimentation that this blog has encouraged me to do, I've changed from being indifferent to sembei to being quite the fan of it. In fact, I can safely say that it's something I'm going to miss when I eventually return to the U.S.

While this change of heart on the minor topic of sembei has been great for me, it's not been so good for my husband. He hates the smell of sembei and my occasional indulgence in a cracker or two puts him out. The solution, of course, is to not eat any sembei in front of him. That being said, I believe I have found a sembei that even a sembei hater might like.


I found this small (30 gram/1 oz.) bag for about 150 yen ($1.45) at FamilyMart. I've struck gold several times at FamilyMart while searching for sembei-based snacks in atypical flavors. A few of my favorites from there include the corn potage and wasabi sembei.

These rice crackers smell just like garlic bread and taste almost as good as the real deal. They don't even carry the telltale scent of baked rice cracker that you usually get with sembei. The flavor is a well-balanced blend of garlic with butter, salt and parsley. The crackers are about half the size of your average sembei, but they're light and the whole bag only has 145 calories.

I loved these and would recommend them over something like a potato chip any day. They're a limited edition from Kameida Seika which will be in shops for only about 4 months so you need to get out and sample them now while you have a chance. Even my husband, who dislikes sembei, liked these.