Nippon Ham Chilled Bakery Cheese Pie

I once read a blog post on an aggregating site which offered information on more ecologically sound living which said that cheese is an addictive substance. The article talked about how cheese is engineered to act like cocaine and that the reason we enjoy it so much is that we are chemically bound to it in a manner which is equivalent to the crackhead and his pipe. Realizing that this was vegan propaganda, I closed the tab and never read anything on that site again.

Of course, assuming it is true that we're addicted to cheese, I can't say that I would care. Some addictions are worth the suffering  (though I do apologize to the cows). If I could eat just one food for the rest of my life in all of it glorious permutations, it wouldn't be chocolate that would win, but cheese. I'm guessing that I spent a past life in Wisconsin. The grim irony is that I live in one of the worst places in the world if you're a cheese lover. It's a wasteland studded with bizarre mixtures of cheese and other things that don't belong in the majesty of its dairy kingdom and processed dreck.

The thing is that I think I'm starting to become so used to the weird experiences with Japanese cheese that I'm starting to like what I have available. This troubles me slightly, but on the other hand, a crack monkey probably will smoke whatever he can get if the best isn't available so why should a cheese monkey be any different?

With the full knowledge that this was going to be odd, I picked up this package of 4 "cheese pies" at Inageya Supermarket  for 298 yen ($3.68). They are sweetened with honey and use Gouda cheese and I knew I was stepping through that looking glass of savory and pungent mixed with sweet that the Japanese do so often, but not so well.

These pies are sold as "premium", which is rather funny considering the fact that they're just slightly squished pre-baked dough with a little filling. In fact, the filling only covers about half of the total length of the hand-length pie. The size is pretty good though for a continental breakfast and at only 181 calories, they fit easily into a sensible diet.

The instructions say to bake at 1000W for 4 minutes, but I found that this browned the outside but left part of the cheese filling cold. A better method is to bake for 3-4 minutes then allow it to rest in the oven an additional two minutes to allow it to heat through, though this does make the pastry a tad darker. This leaves you with a really nicely crispy outer crust and a tender inside. The dough portion is slightly sweet and has an adequate texture and "baked" flavor. That is, a nice floury, margarine-y taste. I liked the dough quite a lot, but I am not comparing it to a fresh croissant. It's good for what it is, but doesn't compare to fresh and hand-baked.

The filling is lightly sweet, slightly pungent and not too terrible, but, again, I think I've adjusted to this odd mix. I'm not sure other foreign palates would find it so acceptable. My husband didn't care for it at all, though he prefers much sweeter things than I do anyway. The texture of the filling is similar to cream cheese offerings, but not similar in flavor. It's not gooey, but rather closer to creamy, though also a bit chunky.

I was surprised that I actually liked this, and would buy it again if I wanted to have a pastry on hand to toss in the toaster oven for a hot breakfast. Depending on how acclimated you are to the cheese in Japan, you might like this, but I'm not making any promises that it'll suit all Western taste buds.

Nippon Ham French Bread Pizza

I rarely buy frozen or chilled pizzas in Japan. In fact, I'm pretty sure that aside from a random Lawson VL "Mix" pizza for 100 yen (like this tuna one, only without the tuna and mayo) every once in a blue moon (however often blue moons make an appearance), every pizza I've bought of this type has been reviewed in this blog. 

I like to think I buy such pizzas when I have forgotten how bad they are in Japan, but the truth is that I occasionally sort of crave a bad pizza. That is, I crave one until I actually have one and then I am full of regret and bad carbohydrates. At the very least, I can always get a review out of these things when I take the occasional pizza plunge.

One "pizza" sealed for your protection.

This particular "chilled" pizza is "Japan's #1 brand" of said type of pizza according to the advertising. I have to wonder if that has more to do with the pricing and portions than the quality. I found this bag of 4 hot-dog-bun-sized "French Bread" pizzas at Seiyu supermarket for a mere 298 yen ($3.69). Any time each serving comes in at less than 100 yen ($1.24) each, it's on the cheap side for Japanese prepared foods. Each serving provides 245 calories and a small mix of cheese and a few scraps of ham and sausage. The ingredients include flour, "natural cheese" (as opposed to the ominpresent processed stuff in Japan), tomato puree, bacon, and very curiously, "apple pulp".

It sort of looks like the bottom of your shoe after you have stepped in something really nasty, doesn't it?

I had the first pizza as I imagine they are intended to be prepared. I unwrapped it from it's tight plastic and placed it directly on the toaster oven grate without a tray. The packaging makes a point of telling you not to use a tray so that you can get cheese all over the toaster oven and have a devil of a time cleaning the mess up later. The instructions recommend you toast it for a spare 3 minutes at 1000W, but that wasn't even long enough to melt the cheese. I think I gave it 7 minutes to get the cheese to the melted state you see in the picture above.

As for the pizza itself, there's a reason I compared its size to a hot dog bun and that's the fact that it tastes a lot like the devil's spawn of said bun and French bread, and this is an offspring which favors the dog's bun side of the family in texture. The bread does not get crispy at all if you heat it from the chilled state to a point where the cheese hasn't turned into a mass of brown bubbles. The results were a little better when I froze the remaining "pizzas" and toasted them longer. The bread had time to get slightly crispy before the frozen cheese got too over-cooked.

The flavor of this was pretty much like cheese on bread with the faintest hint of tomato. It wasn't a bad thing, but it was nothing like a "pizza" or even French bread. I did eat the rest, but mainly because it was there and easy to prepare. I also had a vat of lentil soup I had been trying to eat up over several days and this was a decent accompaniment. I wouldn't recommend this unless you're too lazy to put cheese on your own hot dog bun or piece of bread. You can do better even doing that if you use more flavorful cheese.

Oyatsu Chicken Ramen (mini packs)

Being a consumer is a complicated experience. People are constantly attempting to manipulate you into buying things you probably don't want or need, or possibly even enjoy. The really skillful ones will convince you that you want something. The gifted ones will get you to buy something even when you are fully aware that you are being completely manipulated and really don't want something.

I don't really like ramen (or any kind of noodles), and I don't care for cutesy junk which litters my apartment, so how is it that I ended up buying this package of mini bags of ramen with a cute little mascot-related toy? Well, they suckered me in for two reasons. First of all, the packaging is just too cool given that it is chicken ramen and the design resembles Japanese egg cartons. It is excellent design. The second is that I run this blog, and this looked like a nifty little thing to talk about because it has more depth to it than your average chocolate bar. So, here I am, with a 100-yen pack of ramen and a toy that I will be sending off to my sister so that she can give it to some child as a prize when her library holds a reading contest. Speaking of contests, toys, and prizes, stay tuned for tomorrow's post...

To make the toy work, you remove the chick from the egg (it's held in with a magnet), run it backwards across a flat surface, (carefully) put the chick back in and it'll go rushing forward (if it doesn't fall over backward because you were careless when you put the chick back in). The chick has a magnet which releases a lever when you replace it.

I actually have eaten ramen a few times in the past, but not this brand or type. When I first came to Japan, I would occasionally buy it for lunch at work because it was cheap, fast, and easy to prepare. I realize that it is nutritionally a zero, and that it is pretty much just salt and bad carbohydrates. That's probably why it's the food of choice for many college kids, but I'm 46 years old. I'm not sure this is what my body is meant to tolerate. Fortunately, the packages are very small so I didn't have to eat too much at once.

The instructions tell you to use 150 ml. of hot water, which is about 3/4 of a cup. My plan from the start was to sample this a bit by itself, then to add some cooked chicken breast and onions to the soup to add protein. I also had a raw tomato and salad on the side. I'm not sure if that helps with the fact that this has 560 mg. of sodium, but it makes me feel a bit less guilty about having it at all.

As far as taste goes, this is actually relatively mild on the saltiness. It tastes weakly of fried chicken and is a little oily. The noodles are your standard cheap ramen fare. They're limp and tasteless, and don't seem to absorb much of the flavor. The strange thing is that I sampled a broken piece of the noodles before adding the water, and they are very flavorful in their dry form.

This wasn't bad at all, but it wasn't exciting either. I'm very happy with the portion size, and if you're a fan of ramen and don't want to knock back a huge bowl of it, this would fit the bill. It's supposed to be the "cup-a-soup" size of ramen. You can't expect much, as this is instant ramen. I wouldn't buy it again, but I'll eat the second packet.

Viva Buono Bacon Pizza

When my friend April Marie mentioned having a personal pizza for under 600 calories, I developed a craving for pizza. She was kind enough to share her information about the pizza she had bought on her blog, but I couldn't find the Nippon Ham pizza that she was eating at my local market. Once one gets a craving though, it's hard to escape it. I picked up a similar looking pizza from Marudai, maker of a good many prepared foods including various meats, yogurt, and, of course pizzas.



My Marudai bacon pizza had one virtue that April Marie's didn't and lacked one that hers had. This pizza was only 505 calories, but she said hers was "delish" and mine certainly was not. The size of the pizza is quite generous at about 8 inches (20 cm.) in diameter. In fact, I could only eat half of it at once.


The page for this pizza claims it has "plenty of shredded bacon", but it doesn't have plenty of anything except sauce and crust. There's also supposed to be wine and clam in the sauce, but I couldn't really detect anything. The sauce was fine though. It has a pretty strong flavor, but the problem is that the sauce is almost all that can be tasted. The cheese is flavorless and after the pizza cools off, it's like a plastic layer on top. The bacon is so sparse as to present a simple ham aftertaste. The crust is soft, but inoffensive.

This pizza wasn't terrible, and I will eat the other half of it. That being said, it wasn't even as good as the 100 yen tuna mayo pizza that I got from Lawson's. I certainly wouldn't buy it again because I like my pizza to have more than a smattering of cheese on it.

Lawson VL Yaki Onigiri

I think that onigiri (rice ball) is probably the number one snack in Japan, though it isn't glamorous enough to get talked about much and is close enough to real food that it's not seen as a "snack". Any time a Japanese person feels peckish, but doesn't feel like a meal, they tend to grab one of these at convenience stores. Onigiri is on offer at most "conbini" for 100 yen ($1.14), often in a familiar triangular presentation. They usually have a filling (seafood in most cases) or are mixed with other seasoning elements (fish flakes, beans, etc.), and nori (dry, paper-like seaweed) is separated from the rice so that it can be wrapped around the rice ball without absorbing the moisture. Onigiri is a handy snack which provides energy and enough substance for a full feeling.

Before I came to actually like plain Japanese rice, I liked onigiri and occasionally bought them at 7-11 when I worked at Nova language school so very long ago (19 years ago). My favorite has always been grilled ("yaki") onigiri, which is a rice ball that has been brushed with a soy-sauce-based seasoning and cooked until the exterior is brown and slightly crispy. When my friends and I went to our favorite yakitori joint, I'd always order yaki onigiri.

These days, I tend to just make my own plain white rice and haven't enjoyed a nice grilled rice ball for a long time. Part of the reason for this is that they're much more expensive than just making rice myself. That being said, I can't grill rice balls because I don't have the proper type of grill and I'm also frankly too lazy to mess about forming the balls and brushing them with sauce.

I needed something to eat with the remaining lemon basil chicken that I reviewed previously (yes, it took me many weeks to eat the rest of them) and I figured this pack of 3 grilled rice balls from Lawson's 100 yen shop would do the trick. I figured that if I were desperate enough to eat frozen chicken, I'd probably be happy to have something else that was frozen along with it as I generally resort to frozen food in moments of fatigue, illness, or dire hunger brought on by waiting too long to start preparing food.

These rice balls are quite small. Each is about a half cup of rice pressed into a fairly firm ball. The instructions on the package offer different cooking times based on microwave wattage and how many rice balls you are cooking at once. I made only one because 93 calories of carbohydrate is enough for me for lunch. The outside of the onigiri is nicely brown with soy sauce and possibly is actually grilled. The inside is just plain rice. I put this in the microwave when it was frozen solid and one minute and ten seconds at 600 watts brought it out steaming hot.

The rice was tender, yet firm. The smell was actually very nice because of the seasoning. The soy sauce-based exterior was flavorful and had a good balance. The only thing that separated this from the yaki onigiri that I ordered at yakitori restaurants was the lack of a crispy outside. Still, I think it would be hard to make this the same as a freshly grilled rice ball, particularly when heating it in the microwave as crispness is usually the first thing you lose when freezing and irradiating food.

I liked this quite a lot and would definitely have it again if I was feeling lazy or simply wanted to keep something on hand in the freezer to have with a meal and I didn't have time to cook rice. If rice is fairly boring to you, this may float your boat because of the soy sauce flavoring. At 100 yen for 3 balls, it's also pretty reasonable economically.

Meiji Cheese Fondue (Individual size)

My husband and I bought a gigantic 6-lb. bag of mini pretzels from Costco over a month ago and haven't even made a dent in it yet. If you marry our abundant supply of salty-bread-based twists with a desire on my part to find another processed cheese product to review, you'll know my motivation in choosing this single serving fondue as a snack.


I found this at a Lawson's 100 shop (so it cost 100 yen or about a dollar) and was intrigued by the small size and the fact that it says that this is made of "natural cheese" (as opposed to processed cheese). Mind you, this is still processed cheese to me. Anything which is processed such that it melts evenly and contains additives is "processed" in my book.

There are picture-based instructions on the top of the box, which I didn't pay attention to and therefore did not follow. I did look at the top of the little cup and did the important thing, and that was to remove the plastic seal from the top of the cup. That meant I didn't explode the fondue all over the microwave. The part that I didn't do was place the solidified cheese bowl back into the box before putting it into the microwave. I'm guessing this step is to steam the fondue a bit, but I don't think it mattered at all.



This smelled like mild cheese, unsurprisingly. The texture is smooth and it is a good consistency for dipping. You're supposed to microwave it for 40 seconds at 500-600 watts, and that allows you to eat it all before it completely congeals. It did start to solidify to some extent, but it wasn't an issue given that the portion is small and it's easy to finish up before it totally returns to it's original state.

The taste is better than most processed cheese. It resembles Gouda with a hint of Swiss. It's definitely not as intense as some cheeses (like Cheddar), but there is a tiny whisper of aged cheese flavor. It's not great, but it's serviceable and better than some processed cheeses. I do wish it was a bit sharper.

There are 45 grams (1.6 oz.) and 94 calories of fondue in the bowl and that's actually a pretty good portion size. There is enough cheese to dip 12-14 mini pretzels. I had this as an afternoon snack and found it pretty satisfying as a more filling and marginally less "junky" snack. I'm not doing cartwheels over it, but I'd probably buy it again if the mood struck me or I wanted a snack and felt like spending too much so I could dip my pretzels in warm, melted cheese without making an effort on my part.

Ajinomoto Lemon Basil Chicken

One of my readers commented that he would like to see me review more frozen foods or ready-to-eat foods. In response to this, I'm going to try and fit in one of these types of reviews about once a month even though they're not snacks. Since I cook most of the food I eat, this isn't the sort of thing that I take to naturally. That being said, I think it will be interesting to investigate some of these items on an infrequent, though hopefully regular, basis. Trust me when I say that this is in no way an indication that I'm running out of snacks to review. In fact, recently I was struck by the fact that I will never run out of new snacks to try.

I chose this package of frozen nuggets because it was one of the few things which wasn't pasta or rice-based in the small frozen foods case. For the record, the majority of the frozen food in Japan is "doria" or "gratin" (cheese, rice, and some animal-based protein), with an emphasis on shrimp versions. Since shrimp makes me gag, you won't be seeing any reviews of shrimp-based dishes. A lot of the other frozen food bits are fried foods like tempura or other types of fried cutlets which are designed to be put in bento boxes.

I found this at Inageya supermarket for 198 yen ($2.13) for 6 nuggets. The nuggets are a little big. I'd say each is about one and a half times the size of a McDonald's nugget. There are 38 calories per nugget. I'm not a big eater, so three of these accompanied by a little under a cup of rice (and some carrots) was a big enough portion for me for lunch. The ingredients include chicken, soy sauce, mirin (sweet Japanese cooking sake), various meat extracts, basil, parsley, and caramel coloring.

The company that makes these, Ajinomoto, is well-known for its seasonings including MSG, frozen foods, and prepared foods. They make a lot of packaged soups, dressings, and mixes designed to allow for faster food preparation. Early on in my stay in Japan, I tried their "Cook-Do" series for "mabonasu" (a Chinese-style eggplant dish), and wasn't too impressed. Part of their marketing includes the slogan "welcome to tasty Japan." I think that the basic idea is that their foods offer people the taste of Japan through their seasonings.

The nuggets are packaged in little plastic cups that are perforated so that you can break them apart and heat them individually. Though they look a little like something with a fried coating, they're actually little formed bits of white meat chicken with a thin, chicken-skin-like coating. I was ready to pop these in the toaster oven, but the directions on the package explicitly say not to use such a device. I'm guessing that this is because the seasoned skin-like covering would stick like mad to a toaster oven tray and you'd be left with just the processed chicken and no seasoned jacket.

I microwaved three nuggets at 600 W in their individual plastic cups as instructed for 1 minute, and they were still cold so I gave it another minute and that seemed about right. The package instructs you to use an oven with a turntable for even heating, but mine doesn't have one so I just rotated the plates at the half-way point.

The smell coming from them was like funky cooking oil. I'm guessing this was the lemon and basil seasoning. The exterior was quite greasy, as you can see from the shiny exterior in the above picture of the heated chicken balls. The texture was probably the worst part. The chicken is somewhat spongy with a stretchy very thin exterior which is tough to cut through with a fork. In fact, it was difficult to cut them in half and eat the meat proportionally with the rice. I'm guessing that these are meant to be snarfed down whole rather than cut into dainty bits for people like me who prefer not to go all chipmunk-cheeked when I eat.

It doesn't taste like fried chicken, despite looking like it. Mainly, you can taste lemony basil oil with a heavier emphasis on a canned lemon juice taste. It's a little salty, but not over the top. The flavor is not bad at all, but not a great one either. It doesn't taste like much on the chicken front, and the spices could be better. That being said, I think this was at least as good as a fast food nugget. That's not high praise as I think fast food nuggets are generally pretty tasteless and awful.

Though I will finish the package and have the other three nuggets, I wouldn't buy these again. One thing to keep in mind is that I'm a pretty good cook and I set the bar somewhat high on things like this. I can cook chicken very well, and these don't come close to how tasty a well-cooked piece of breast meat comes out. I think people who don't cook might find them more enjoyable than I do. Certainly they're worth a try if you can't cook or have limited options.

Nippon Ham La Pizza Margherita

I have a confession to make. No, I'm not a man. I'm also not really Japanese. And, I'm not a sentient Japanese love doll come to life. This is a confession with a little "c". I like the sort of bad pre-made pizza that you sometimes get in deli and freezer sections. I prefer good pizza, of course, but I have an affinity for any type. That's why you will continue to see the occasional review of such things here.


Since I prefer a good one, I picked up this "La Pizza" brand pizza, by the folks at Nippon Ham when my friend April Marie Claire recommended this line on her blog. She mentioned that you can have a whole pizza for around 600 calories (depending on the type). She also mentioned that they are fresh, and I believe that is true since they have a relatively current expiration date on them and are kept in the refrigerated section instead of the freezer.

I had the choice of several varieties of pizza, including cheese with meat sauce, double bacon, sausage and beef stew. I decided to go for one that didn't have meat because the sausage and ham made in Japan can sometimes taste a bit funky and that's why I'm talking about the margherita one.

The pizza is a lot smaller than the package would lead you to believe. It's 22-23 cm. around (8.6-9 in.), but the package is 30 cm. (11.8 in.) square. The whole pizza has 624 calories if you skip the oily basil sauce packet. You can add in 41 more calories if you add the sauce.


I am trying to limit portions so I only made half of it at once and I cooked it in the toaster oven with a pre-heated tray. That is, I put the empty tray in the toaster oven and get it hot so that the crust is heated up more quickly. One of the problems I have with small Japanese ovens is that the cheese gets overcooked while the crust stays soggy because the heating element is too close to the top of the pizza. I put the basil sauce on one slice and left the other plain to compare the flavor. Because of the way I cut the pizza into 4 slices before cooking it, the cheese slid off onto the tray a bit and the crust stayed soft despite my efforts to crisp it up with a preheated tray.

One thing that I noticed about this pizza as compared to most of the others I've found in Japan is that it has more cheese, though it's still fairly concentrated in the center. It doesn't smell like much other than plain old vague pizza scent. The flavor is excellent though. The cheese is real and actually tastes like good mozzarella. The tomato sauce could be a bit zestier, but it is fine and fills the bill adequately. It's not acidic or too salty. Japanese pizza sauce that is sold in tubes for people to make pizza toast usually is very oily, acidic and tastes odd. This sauce has none of those bad points. The basil sauce, which I was worried would be too much, was excellent and added a very pleasant dimension. I wished I had put it on both slices.

This was a really nice deli pizza. It's by far the best pre-made heat and eat pizza I've had in 20 years in Japan. A big part of that is the cheese, but the basil sauces was also good. The only down side for me was that the crust was soft, but I think that could be fixed by placing the entire pizza directly on the rack rather than putting it on a tray. Unfortunately, I can't do that with mine since I already cut it into 4 slices and the cheese will leak off the edges if I put it on the rack. I add my recommendation to try this pizza to April Marie's. As she says, "it's delish."

Viva Buono Pizza Wiener Rapper

Several days ago, I spent some time listening to a lot of Weird Al Yankovic's somewhat more recent releases. Every time he said the word "wiener", it struck me as funny, especially when he used it as a euphemism for a male body part (because Al's songs are PG-friendly). It could be my inner juvenile asserting itself, but I think it has more to do with how Al sings the word. After all, he's a pretty funny guy.


I'm not sure if it was hearing him say "wiener" in his songs or if this simply looked like the better of a dismal selection (2 choices) of heat and eat burritos at the market, but I picked this up to eat when I was in a bind for something fast. As I've mentioned before, I rarely eat this sort of prepared food because it is bad for you, low quality and expensive in Japan. As I also said before, I would be more than happy to do a Heat and Eat Review style blog of Japanese food if there were enough of it around and it didn't suck so bad.


The forces that drove me to this type of food were copious amounts of badly-scheduled work. Even though I work from home, there simply was insufficient time between lessons and jobs to whip up something homemade and clean up after it. So, I had a choice of anemic, badly-made bagels in 3 flavors (blueberry, caramel, and ham and cheese), refrigerated pizza and pizza bread with almost no cheese or meat on it, and either a ham and cheese or "pizza wiener" Rapper. I chose this because it seemed to have the best protein potential due to the "wiener", but my expectations were very low. For what it's worth, this contained 311 calories and 15.2 grams of fat (8.9 of saturated fat), but I would never expect this kind of food to be healthy.

This smelled mainly like the wiener. Japanese hotdogs are a bit weird and clearly made with different meat or spices than American ones. A lot of people find them inedible because of this. The wiener in this was not nearly as intense with the strange flavors as some I've had (particularly on pizzas). It did have a very tough casing that was hard to bite through and a pretty mushy interior.

Mainly, this tasted like the hotdog. The "pizza" aspect was pretty close to non-existent. It's mildly spicy in a nondescript way, probably from whatever spices are in the wiener and a bit of a tomato flavor mixed in. The cheese had no flavor and added only texture. I was sure that it was processed cheese, though the ingredients said it was "natural cheese". The tortilla is okay, not bad, but a bit gluey and it sticks to your teeth (as does the cheese).

All in all, this wasn't horrible, but it left me with a stomachache for some reason. It filled the empty spot and it did it fast and with minimal mess (save the knife and plate I had to use to cut it for picture-taking). I also have to give the manufacturers credit for not making it look better than it really is with a misleading picture on the label. I wouldn't buy this again, but I can't say it didn't meet my expectations. That's mainly because my expectations were appropriately low.

And note that I know this wasn't a "snack", but I figure that I eat these so infrequently that a review now and then of these things might be interesting. What is more, I definitely want to remember how I feel about these so I won't buy them again. :-p

Lawson Value Line Tuna Mayo Pizza

There's an excellent blog called "Heat Eat Review" which features frozen and ready to eat food reviews. I've often thought that such an idea would be interesting for Japanese frozen or prepared meals, but the truth is that there isn't much of such types of food around relative to the U.S. The fact that women tend to cook most of the time and housewives are still pretty common means people tend to get full and balanced meals rather than grab something quick. Also, the types of food that are available in this area tend to be expensive and of very poor quality. It'd require one to eat an entire meal of junk instead of just the snack size things that I review.

As I mentioned in a former review of a prepared ham and cheese bagel, I rarely buy prepared food, frozen or otherwise. The only time I tend to buy it is when I'm not feeling well and feel too tired or sick to cook. The night before I bought the Lawson's Value Line frozen pizza that I only slept about 4 hours, so I was ripe for an easy meal when I hit the local convenience store for milk. I found this pizza, along with a similar one called a "mix pizza" and decided to give it a go.


The pizza cost 100 yen (about a dollar) and is 14 cm (5.5 in.) in size. The entire pizza has 249 calories, which is what puts it into the "snack" range and not a meal. It comes in a plastic shrink-wrapped package inside of it's main plastic package. I guess they feel it needs the extra wrapping for freezer burn protection. The instructions on the package recommend that you cook this in the toaster oven for 5-6 minutes at 1000 watts, but I found that was not long enough for the cheese to melt or the crust to get a bit brown.


After cooking, the pizza smells odd. It has a bit of a tomato smell, but also a strange nondescript fishy smell which I associate with Japanese food. I'm guessing that smell would be the tuna. While the crust is your standard preformed crust, it actually has a little better texture than average. The outsides is slightly crispy and the inside is nicely chewy. The sauce is inoffensive, but not very flavorful. In fact, the main problem is that aside from the crust and the tomato sauce, there's very little flavor at all. The tuna is more of an aftertaste than an actual topping. The cheese is so sparse as to be undetectable as is the corn.


I should note that I had very low expectations of this given that it's very small and cheap, and frozen pizza in Japan is abysmal on the whole. The crust exceeded my expectations, but the toppings were about usual for a Japanese frozen pizza. This makes for a pretty nice "bread" if you manage to cook it just right in the oven. It really isn't much as pizza though. If you'd like a soft, warm pizza-flavored bread to go along with a salad or as a snack at tea time, this wouldn't be a bad choice. I'd say this is fine as long as you're in the mood for that and nothing more.

Soft Bagel Ham & Cheese

That nice picture of the bagel with lots of gooey cheese around the edge is a big, fat lie.

Most of the time, I shy away from pre-prepared food. It's always disappointing and not very filling. Sandwiches in Japan are particularly underwhelming because they are almost always made with white bread and high fat, low protein fillings. Once every month or two, I'll feel too overwhelmed to go to the trouble of making something decent from the scraps around the apartment and give in to buying some marginally appetizing food in a plastic package. Of course, I feel guilty later for having done so because the packaging is always wasteful.

In the case of the "soft bagel" ham and cheese sandwiches, the packaging isn't too terribly bad as buying three bagels would net me a plastic bag anyway. Buying ham would add in a styrofoam tray and the cheese would add in another plastic bag. So, my guilt is mitigated a bit knowing the components would bring more waste than the end product in this particular case.

These bagels definitely fall under the "snack" category rather than "meal" because they are on the smallish side though they are a heartier snack than most. There are three bagels in a cardboard tray with a moisture absorbing pack in each bag. The moisture absorber must be good because the expiration date on my package was two weeks after the date on which I purchased it. The ham must be cured within an inch of its life to stay "fresh" for so long.

The 3-pack costs about 370 yen ($3.43 USD) so it's 123 yen ($1.14) per bagel. This makes it a cheaper snack than a box of Pocky or some more lavish candy bars. Each is a relatively modest 227 calories. The instructions tell you that you can microwave it for 50 seconds or toast it, but microwaving bread is always a bad idea, so I decided to toast it.

You only need a smattering of cheese, as long as it's smattered in the right place and can fool the consumer.

Though these are made by Nippon Ham, the quanitity of ham is very skimpy. You get one tiny, thin slice which doesn't even cover the entire small bagel. The cheese distribution is shameful. You get a small sprinkling concentrated around the bagel's center to fool you into thinking it's a reasonably cheesy sandwich when you look at the bagels through the clear plastic part of the packaging.

The filling is utterly anemic and I couldn't taste the ham much at all. It was more like a condiment than a component of the sandwich (and a weak one at that). However, the bagel is really very good. When toasted, it's shiny and a tad crispy on the outside and nicely chewy inside. Considering that buying an average plain bagel in Japan costs almost the same as one of these sandwiches, the value isn't bad as long as you're mainly buying it for the bagel itself. I beefed mine up a bit with some more cheese, spread some mayonnaise and coarsely ground mustard on it and added a side of sliced tomatoes and soup for a small meal. The back of the package recommends you add in some avocado and a salad to make it a "California bagel."

I can see myself buying these again when I'm lazy or too tired to mess around. If I were working in an office and wanted to have something to snack on with more heft, I'd definitely consider buying a package of these  to dissuade me from buying sweets or chips.