Karume Sugar Candy

First of all, I must apologize for the fact that my picture shows a largely empty bag. I have developed a problem with keeping track of my pictures and I blame it all on Blizzard Entertainment and Apple Computer. If you'd like to travel with me now down my road of convoluted logic which allows me to misplace responsibility for my own carelessness on two major corporations, keep reading. If not, well, skip to the end and read the stuff about the actual food.

I am not a rich person. For some reason, the handful of pennies that Google ads net me for these blogs hasn't really kept me in enough scratch for a new computer. I've been using a Mac Mini for several years and it's showing it's age in multiple ways. However, I am also a fan of the Diablo series of games from Blizzard. They released Diablo III last May and my little Mini barely met the graphics card specs. Hurray... except, not so much because playing the Mac version of the game would have required me to pony up $70 in OS upgrades. I don't know why, except, perhaps, oh, corporate greed, that the Mac side needs a more updated OS than the PC side. If you have a Windows box, you can get by on the venerable old Windows XP.

Unfortunately, I left my Windows computer in Japan because it required an extra plane to lug that behemoth home (and it was about 5 years old to boot). The way out of this for someone as cheap and relatively impoverished as me was to install XP on my Mac and boot back and forth between the Mac and Windows sides on the Mac Mini. Hurray! Problem solved! I could play Diablo III and nobody got more money out of me for an upgrade that I did not care about.

Unfortunately, I now find myself downloading pictures into both OS's. It is, essentially, the equivalent of two computers without the convenience of two separate hard drives and displays. I get extremely confused about which side of the Mac has photos and think sometimes that I've downloaded pictures when I have not, or I simply can't find them on the Windows side because I forget where they were put as it seems they are put in a different place each time. This is why I am losing my pictures. You see, if Blizzard hadn't required Mac OS 10.6 or higher or if Apple didn't charge for incremental upgrades, you'd be getting the pictures you deserve as my patient, patient audience.

I do have a small picture of the full bag which I can crop out of a large picture of all of my purchases. This is the best I can do. Write to Blizzard and Apple and complain for me, won't you?

So, on to the candy, which I bought ages ago at Daiso Japan for $1.50 (120 yen ) and have been slowly nibbling on over a couple of months. This is made by a company called Ogawa confectionery and they have no web presence so there was nothing I could learn about their other products. This is a fairly simple and old-fashioned offering of a brown-sugar-based treat.

Inside the bag are 3.2 oz./90 grams of stubby nubs that have a very crispy texture and are laced with air pockets. This makes them have the feeling of a honey comb and they shatter easily when you bite into them. The flavor depth is very shallow, unfortunately. The ingredients list is brief, but a little scary - coarse sugar, granulated sugar, baking soda, and two artificial colors (which is unusual for a Japanese processed food). The taste is pretty much like a spoonful of brown sugar, but the textural element does lend a nice quality to it. I'm guessing that the baking powder is what makes these nice and airy while they are cooked up inside of 6-sided mold.  

I can't say that I regret buying this. I do like crispy things and brown sugar, but I haven't eaten it straight from the bag since I was a kid. I have been ever so slowly eating this, but ultimately, I need something more sophisticated to keep me coming back for more. 

Taishyo Ame

As I grew increasingly bored by the sweets on offer in usual venues (convenience stores, supermarkets, snack shops) in Tokyo, I started to look further afield for interesting items. During my last year in Japan, I happened to work near not one, not two, but three shops specializing in regional sweets. One of them sold items from Hokkaido, including the Guarana soda I reviewed previously. It was at that very shop (in Shinjuku, near the Southern Terrace exit), I found this little bit of candy for 50 yen (about 60 cents).

I like old-fashioned packaging, and often was drawn to candy merely by such packaging. Unfortunately, what lured the foreign snack review blogger didn't necessarily draw in the jaded locals, who often saw such candy as something their parents or grandparents ate. Let's face it, this is not the sort of thing that people are going to be loudly shouting about in television commercials. It's far more likely to be welded to the bottom of your granny's pocketbook after being forgotten over a hot summer.

The company that makes this is called Kibidango and they make a relatively small range of traditional treats. I reviewed their "millet dumpling" awhile back with limited enthusiasm. They make the sort of stuff that most foreigners would shun based on the inability to determine what is inside. Even if you bought it based on the packaging, it might scare you away once you saw what was inside. Let's face it, this looks like it may have gone moldy with the little black specks embedded in the whiteness.

Inside the wrapper is a flat little block (18 grams or about half an ounce) covered in oblaat, an edible wrapper which is similar to the types of coatings on (medicinal) capsules. The ingredients list is very short and is only malt syrup, sugar, sesame, and oblaat. The little slab is rather tough and hard to bite into. It's like taffy or hard nougat that you have to fight free from the larger piece in order to take a bite of it. Think of yourself like a dog that is trying to wrest the rag free from your master's hands as you attempt to tear off a bit. After you manage to bite off a piece, it'll slowly become more pliable and taffy-like in your mouth. It'll stick to your teeth like nobody's business and threaten to rip out your fillings.

The question is, is it worth the chewing? The answer is a less than resounding, "yes". The reward is a very nicely flavored bit of black sesame taffy which is has a good, but not cloying or overbearing sweetness. Mind you, I recommend only eating about half of the small portion at once as the sweetness does build up as you eat more. However, I did like the flavor of this quite a lot, but I didn't care for the texture much at all, especially in terms of trying to tear a bit free of the entire smallish piece. I'd say this is worth a try if you like taffy and have good, strong teeth. This gets a "happy" rating, but only barely.

Fujiya Big Milky Balls (QR)

My New Year's fukubukuro continues to be a snack review albatross around my neck. Yes, it's past the middle of the year and I'm still working my way through those surprise bags of processed food. As time goes by, the less thrilling stuff gets just that much older, and though the name "big balls" sounds impressive, these are really just large gumball-size wads of white taffy candy. The big selling point for them is that they are 1.7 times their previous size. Woohoo?

These are standard taffy balls in many ways. When warm, they are soft and easy to chew. When cold, they are hard a chore for the jaw. I first sampled these in February and remember having them stick to my teeth and tax my muscles quite a bit more. In July, they're not nearly such a hassle. The main difference is in the flavor which is rather buttery and fatty compared to similar things I've sampled back home. There isn't a strong flavor, which probably isn't a bad thing since "milk" flavor in Japan often means actual "milk" and not "vanilla". That often means "powdered milk" taste, not good farm fresh delight.

These aren't bad at all, but any sort of taffy candy is essentially grandma's territory and hard to get too excited about At only 23 calories per ball, it's not a bad way to get something sweet in your mouth for awhile, but eating just one makes my teeth ache and this isn't my sort of candy. I figure that it'll probably take me the rest of the year to get around to finishing the remainder of this small bag.

Heiwa Soba Boro (buckwheat cookies)

Back home, buckwheat is something I have mainly experienced in pancakes. It's one of those flavors that takes on more appeal as you get older because it has a heartier, earthier flavor than baked goods made with white flour. I first experienced these cookies when I was working in a Japanese office. Occasionally, office ladies would give them out as a treat at tea time, or they'd keep a stash in their desk which they'd offer a few of to me or others who happened to glance at them when cookie was heading to mouth. An errant look in the wrong direction and they'd feel obliged to surrender one to onlookers.

I picked up this bag for a mere 99 yen ($1.16) at Okashi no Machioka. The maker, Heiwa Seika, seems to deal only in these types of cookies in various sizes and packaging. You can find them almost anywhere in Japan though for a similar price, and perhaps from a different manufacturer. With many traditional and "grandma's snacks" like these though, there is almost no variation between the taste and quality of the products. If these interest you after reading this review, pretty much anything that resembles these will taste the same.

These cookies smell like the whole grains they are made with. There's also a hint of a "burnt" smell but not the type you'd associate with blackened foods. It's more like something roasted to the limit. It's a nice smell, but not the classic buttery bakery smell that you might expect from a western-style cookie.

The texture of these is dictated to a great extent by the copious amount of egg used in them as well as the sugar. They are light and crispy in a pseudo-meringue type of style. They are airy but not in an insubstantial way. The texture is like the love child of a meringue cookie and a biscotti - super crunchy, but easy to bite into. The flavor is of burnt sugar with a slightly caramel sense (without the buttery notes) and of the whole grain buckwheat the whole wheat flour. They are rather lightly sweet.

The bag I bought had 56 cookies, and I counted them so that I could do calorie counts very precisely. Each is about 4 cm (1.6 in.) in diameter and 11 calories. The ingredients list is short, whole wheat flour, sugar, eggs,  buckwheat flour, and leavening agent. Most of the flavor is coming from the way in which the cookies are cooked and how it affects the sugar.

These are a unique but very tasty cookie. They may not be suitable to everyone's tastes, but I love them. For me, the texture plays a much greater part in my enjoyment of all foods and as a lover of meringue cookies and earthier flavors, these really strike a favorable chord with me. If you love very refined tasting treats full of white sugar and flour, these probably won't do much for you, but I really liked them and will definitely be getting them again and again. Note that they also have a very long shelf life so they'll keep for quite awhile and are good for on-the-go snacking or taking home as souvenirs.

Karinto

Karinto is a traditonal snack in Japan which is deep fried and coated in brown sugar.  Other flavors are also available, but the type you see most often, which resembles something you'd find floating in an unflushed toilet, are these brown sugar varieties. You can find karinto sold pretty much anywhere for a low price. I found mine at Okashi no Machioka discount snack shop in their 100 yen ($1.19) snacks area. This is a pretty typical price for karinto. The manufacturers vary, but most of them are not big companies, have no web sites and use relatively generic packaging, as was the case with the maker of my version.

This is a quintessential example of Japanese junk food as it is essentially a type of fried doughnut-style batter loaded with fat and sugar. These are not a low calorie traditional Japanese snack by any stretch of the imagination. Each piece is approximately 13 calories and is 6 cm long (2.4 in.) and just under 1 cm (.4 in.) wide. The entire 125 gram (4.4 oz.) bag is a whopping 591 calories. The first ingredients are brown sugar, sugar, and then flour.

They smell like a slightly burnt brown sugar donut with some unexpected ingredient which you can't put your finger on. They taste like a deep fried corn snack, like a Cheeto, with brown sugar saturating it at every level. There is a strong flavor of oil and an aftertaste of pure brown sugar. There is also a modest burnt sugar flavor going on.

Though not horrible, there was something about these which hit me as very, very wrong. My guess is it was the oiliness of them and the very sugary nature coupled with the corn snack style texture which I think results from them being a bit like a very dried out doughnut. They had a strong taste of having been fried in oil that had been used a lot and being saturated with oil. The texture was both soft and hard at the same time. I guess that is because they are deep fried, but sugary.

I don't believe that anyone who tries these will hate them, but I'm not sure that they'll love them either. There is a real sense of disharmony to karinto for me in which the elements are all fine or inoffensive, but they come together in a package which doesn't seem right. I also feel like they are really, really poor on the calorie cost to food pleasure ratios, and I almost certainly won't finish the bag and definitely won't buy them again.

If you'd like to share your experiences with weird foods and enter a contest for a chance to win a silly prize, please read this post and make a comment. 

Oshidori Milk "Cake"

When is a cake not a cake? Well, it's not a cake when it's a slab of hardened condensed milk. I have been intrigued by this product for quite some time. It has been in what I call the "Granny's snacks" section of Peacock Supermarket for over a year. I don't believe this is actually a snack for oldsters though. In fact, I think it is specifically designed for children but is in the section with old-fashioned treats.

For those who don't remember, "Granny's snacks" are what I call groups of unglamorous looking treats which are made by smaller companies. I call them that because they are the types of things which I think grandparents keep shoved in the back of a cabinet for months and dole out when grandchildren clamor for treats. I don't know that that is what happens when these are purchased. I just know that they are exiled to a different snack area than the more glamorous chocolates, Pocky, gum, and other items made by bit ticket companies like Lotte, Meiji, and Morinaga.

A package of 10 sticks of this milk candy cost 210 yen ($2.30). Each stick is 8 cm x 2 cm x. 4 cm (3.1" x .8" x .15") in size, and is 25 calories. They are made by a company called Takahata, which has a lot of the common ecological claptrap that many companies like to mention as part of their PR. The company makes handmade cheeses as well as a variety of these milk candies. I've only ever seen this "milk" variety, but they also have other types like chocolate, strawberry, yogurt and green tea.

I have had enough experience with "milk" flavored foods in Japan to know that these were going to taste like condensed milk. The point that I was most interested in understanding was the texture and the sweetness. The first ingredient is milk, followed by sugar. These are fortified with Vitamin E and the packaging advertises the fact that these are rich in Calcium. Each stick boasts 31 mg. of Calcium. To give you some perspective on the relative value of this food, I can tell you that an average adult needs 1000 mg. a day. Eating one of these is a drop in the bucket.

These sticks are hard, even though they look like they might be brittle. Breaking one in half with your hands isn't trivial, and biting into one feels a little like trying to shatter a hard candy with your teeth. I thought perhaps that one was supposed to suck on one like a hard candy, but that didn't seem to work. Not only don't they melt in your mouth very well, but they are the wrong shape. Maybe they're designed for young children to slobber over for a long period of time and take a long time to eat. The way in which they are sold doesn't seem to indicate that though. The multi-packs on the web site for this product look like souvenir packs for adults.

I actually liked these, despite the fact that I'm not over the moon about condensed milk flavor. They were lightly sweet and the flavor seemed relatively mild compared to other "milk" treats. I liked the texture and how they broke up when I bit into them, though frankly I was a little worried about what they'd do to my teeth. I can't recommend these for everyone. I think they're an acquired taste, but if you like condensed milk, they're definitely worth a sampling.

Bontan Ame

I first learned about bontan ame from Kyoto Foodie's post on it. I had seen it in multiple shops, but the old-fashioned packaging sort of faded into the scenery of treats on display. For the record, I found these in a local market for 98 yen (about a dollar). The point about this which most made me want to try it was the fact that it has edible wrapping.

I've read many times about candies produced in Asia that have wrappers that melt away, but I'd never knowingly sampled one before starting this blog and sampling some jelly candies with them. This is a bit of an old-fashioned concept that many modern snack manufacturer's do not follow.

You can tell by the packaging that this candy is based on a citrus fruit. I've seen it translated as "bontan", "buntan" and "bontang", but that probably matters less than the fact that it's a tangy lemon and orange flavor fruit which grows in Southern Japan. I'm guessing folks can buy the fruit in shops there, but personally I've never seen it in markets in Tokyo and therefore never tasted the real fruit.

This candy was first released in 1926 and the maker, Seika Foods, asserts that this is an original candy and not a copy of another confection. That seems like a pretty reasonable assertion. I don't think I've had anything quite like it in my experiences either in Japan or the United States.

The manufacturer's web site and Japanese Wikipedia pages both describe this as "caramel-like", but I think Kyoto Foodie's description of it as "mochi-like" is more apt. The texture to me seemed like a cross between a gummy or jelly candy and mochi. It's not quite as chewy as mochi. It's like a really thick gummy, but not as tough. The external wrapper, incidentally, is like glue when it melts in your mouth. It doesn't have the taste of glue, mind you, just the stickiness.


The flavor is like a mellow orange, with a hint of lemon. It's mildly sweet and has the barest whisper of citrus sourness. It reminds me a lot of a far, far less sugary and chewier, thicker version of a Sunkist fruit gem. For the record, I love Sunkist fruit gems. As it turns out, I liked this even more than the gems because the subdued sweetness was more to my liking. Each candy is 17 calories and I'm guessing that is a better calorie count than the gems as well.

At first, I thought these were incredibly weird because of the edible wrapper's bizarre glue-like dissolve and because they're so thick and chewy. Once I got used to the texture though, I loved them. In fact, I had to force myself to stop after eating three of them (there are 14 in the box) and I'm certain I'm going to buy them again and again. Without a doubt, they are going to be the biggest threat to my teeth since I gave up sugar sodas over two decades ago.

I recommend that anyone who likes citrus fruit gems, jelly candies, or gummies give these a try. I do put a caveat on that suggestion though about the texture. I can see how the texture (and wrapper) can be a big turn-off for some people. I'm going to try and get my husband to try one, but I think I may tell him to remove the wrapper first since he's pretty fussy about such things.

Daiiti Seika Goma (Sesame) Crunch Candy

One of my labels for posts is the category "grandma's snacks". This is the sort of old-fashioned stuff that I believe is marketed toward the older generation and reviewing such items is always a pain in the ass. The main reason for this is that it requires harder research to find the company that made the product, and often a much harder time reading the names of the companies. You can read Japanese characters in different ways such that even Japanese people read names incorrectly. For instance, I have a student name "Satomi" but her name can be read as "Rimi". In fact, when she was referred to me, the referral agency tole me her name was "Rimi" (and they're Japanese). You know that a language is confusing when even its native speakers can't read the names correctly.

With a little help from my husband (who is pretty good at kanji), I learned that this is made by a company named Daichi Seika, though they romanize the characters as Daiiti on their web site. They make a variety of nut brittle types of candies, but mainly focus on peanuts and sesame seeds. Their product line is limited and not incredibly glamorous, as is often the case with grandma's snacks types of treats.


I picked up this bag of very tiny sesame seed bars (5 cm x 2 cm x .5 cm/2 in. x .8 in. x .2 in.) at a local discount snack shop. It was about 120 yen ($1.34) and there are 24 individually wrapped pieces in the bag. Each candy is 22 calories if my math is correct. The first ingredient is sesame seeds and the second is granulated sugar followed by maltose and peanuts. This covers pretty much all of the flavor in these minuscule bits of sesame brittle.

The first taste is of the sesame and familiar sugary flavor. The sugar aspect is just like what I grew up with eating cheap nut brittle. That is, it has no toffee elements to it because there seems to be no butter. That doesn't mean it's bad at all. On the contrary, the sesame seed flavor is so perfect and rich that I think it's better that the sweetness be very simple. There are also tiny bits of peanut in the little slabs which come out when you come across one. Strangely, these smell just like peanuts despite the small amount of them in the bars.

I would absolutely buy these again. They are well-made, fresh, and have a great taste. I also think they'd make a pretty good souvenir for fussier eaters back home, particularly those who want something a little off the beaten path (sesame brittle instead of peanut). The only issue I have with these is that they are extremely hard to limit your intake of. They really are that good and the tiny size can deceive you into thinking eating a lot at once is OK, but those calories start to add up fast.

Sweet Potato Candy (Karaimo)

One of the reasons I started this blog was to compel myself to try new things in Japan. I've lived here a long time, and I believe it's easy to fall into a rut and just forget to bother looking around and trying other things. Another was to develop a better understanding of various Japanese foods, their manufacturers, and the nutritional content of those foods. In that spirit, I've been perusing some parts of the food aisles I normally skip over. One of the places I never paid much attention to was the area containing what I would loosely call the "Grandma's snacks."

These snacks are located in a different area from the candy, cookie and chips that are the most popular and well known. The snacks sold there are in packages with less showy designs and the manufacturers are not well-known. Most of them have no English written on them at all, unlike splashy items like "Pocky" and "Crunky" that are dominated by their big, bold, roman-lettered names. Most of these things are less sweet and supposedly carry a better nutritional profile. They're also rarely individually wrapped.

The main problem with this new approach and blogging about what I find is that it's much more difficult to research such snacks as they aren't high profile. In fact, when I tried to research the sweet potato candy I sampled for this post, I couldn't find much about the sweet or the company that makes them. The ony thing I can say is that several manufacturers make the same candy and they all look just like the one I bought with slightly different packages.

From what little I could find out about these candies, they are considered to be traditional and something which is appropriate for families. This may seem like a pretty bland thing to say, and frankly it is. Most Japanese candy has fluffy, bland marketing behind it, but it doesn't always specifically say it's family-oriented. Many big name commercial sweets are purchased by young adults. There's a whole other range of snacks for kids which have a different flavors, sizes and packaging. The snacks marketed at adults tend to come individually wrapped so they can be eaten slowly and shared with coworkers. Even hard candy is individually wrapped in many cases so sharing is easy and careless re-wrapping once the bag is open won't result in the food going stale or sticky. These types of "Grandma's snacks" are clearly made to be opened, sampled, and carefully resealed for future consumption. I'm wondering if some Japanese old folks keep these types of things around the way my grandmothers used to keep around ribbon candy.

These candies look like a conventional hard candy, but are dull and ever so slightly soft if you squeeze them very hard. They are covered in a fine powder which is not sweet and has the occasional black spec. One of the manufacturers of these types of candies (though not my bag's maker) stated on its web site that these specs are not to be mistaken as dirt or unwanted foreign objects. They are byproducts of the roasting process used to make the candy. I'm guessing the outside powder is some kind of rice, wheat or potato flour which is meant to keep the candies from sticking to each other.

When you open the bag, there is a unusual "spiciness" which you can smell if you sniff very hard. It smells both like and unlike sweet potatoes. I'm guessing that processing them alters the usual scent of Japanese sweet potatoes. The ingredients for this candy are sweet potato syrup , malt syrup, brown sugar, and wheat flour. Though they are not super smooth, they don't feel rough in your mouth, though they are too hard to bite into. You have to suck on them for awhile and they start to soften up and become sticky. Eventually, they develop a caramel or taffy consistency as they are warmed and moistened in your mouth. As they soften, you will naturally start to chew on them and they do stick to your teeth to some extent.

The taste is subtle both in terms of sweetness and sweet potato flavor. They're pleasant, but a little hard to eat and not the sort of thing you're going to go crazy for. I think they're not a bad thing to have lying around to sample once in awhile and they aren't incredibly caloric. The entire bag is 130 grams (4.5 oz.) and contains about 30-35 candies. I didn't count so I can't give an exact number, but I think each candy probably has about 20 calories. Given that they take awhile to eat, you may find that you can satisfy your sweet tooth without scarfing down a lot of calories. I just wish the sweet potato aspect of them was a bit more intense.