Iyokan Tirol Chocolate (product announcement)

Several months ago, I visited my father-in-law and he showed me a couple of oranges which he said he was going to toss out because they tasted like grapefruit to him. I looked at them, and they looked and sounded like iyokan. That's an orange in Japan which is slightly sour, but still sweeter than a grapefruit. It turned out that those were Mineola oranges, which aren't the same as iyokan, but are probably second cousins to one another on the taste scale.

Tirol has decided that iyokan, which is the second most widely produced citrus fruit in Japan after mikan (small Japanese oranges which are similar to Clementines), is a good choice for one of their chocolates. Frankly, I concur, and I hope to locate a bag of these beauties at one of the local Japanese markets in the not too distant future.

There are two types of iyokan chocolates in the bag. One is a cookie variety, which I'm sure just has Tirol's trademark bland crispy little biscuit with some orange sauce on it. The other is a marshmallow with orange sauce over it. Even though this is white chocolate, the bitter notes of iyokan show potential for off-setting the cloying nature of it.