When I was a kid, purple was my favorite flavor for pretty much anything. My mother bought plastic tubes of syrup which you stuck in the freezer and then squeezed out and sucked on until your tongue turned purple. Purple was also my favorite lollipop, Kool-Aid, and sno-cone. Of course, "purple" was supposed to mean "grape", but none of that kid's stuff tasted like real grape. I don't know what flavor it was, but it was probably sugar, purple food coloring, and a little citric acid for bite.
As one becomes an adult, purple food starts to take on a different feel. Except for grapes, it seems like a "wrong" color for food as it carries with it the memory of those artificial treats from when I was too young to know or care what I was eating. For this reason, purple potato Tirol chocolate looks funky. It smells great though, like a yummy roasted sweet potato that you buy from a cart on the street in Tokyo in winter.
My candy melted a little across the top even though we haven't seen a day higher than 83 degrees and I have been keeping this in the refrigerator full-time. My guess is that it happened in transit and is a result of the fact that the chocolate coating is relatively soft. This makes it easy to bite into. The coating is fairly sweet and carries a strong, but not overpowering sweet potato flavor. The cookie adds texture and has no flavor of its own. When I cut this in half and saw that the center was a cookie, I was disappointed and thought that some sort of bean jam or mochi filling might have been better. After eating it though, I think that the cookie was probably the best choice to cut the sweetness a bit.
This was 40 yen (about 37 cents) at a local Family Mart and has 52 calories for its 1 inch square (2.54 cm) size. It's a nice little morsel if you love sweet potatoes (and I do). I'd definitely consider buying it again, though I'm not sure that I could eat more than one at a time. It's unique and enjoyable, but not the sort of thing you're going to put away in large amounts. I'd count that as a benefit.
I was kind of disappointed to see the biscuit inside too!
ReplyDeleteThough if it cuts the sweetness.
It's a funny shade of purple don't you think? Kind of inbetween dark purple and pink.
Is there a sweet potato in Japan that colour? ;)
I love fresh baked purple sweet potato. Simply delicious! I'd take that over candy anyday.
ReplyDeleteI really like the biscuit ones, so I think I would really like this. The purple color does seem really unnatural here; pretty, but unnatural.
ReplyDeleteI would be scared to eat that. It looks like soap.
ReplyDelete