Kashiwado Calcium Sem

In America, most salt is iodized to make sure that we all don't grow goiters the size of footballs in our necks. In Japan, a great deal of food is fortified with Calcium to make sure that they all don't grow up to have the posture of a question mark. In each culture, the choice of nutrient to fortify is based on the traditional diet. Americans don't eat much seafood and Japanese don't drink much milk or consume very much dairy.


Enter this Calcium sembei, which will promote strong bones and teeth without the pesky effects of lactose intolerance (which is supposedly rampant among Asians). In addition to sembei, wafers and cereal bars often have this mineral added to them. I've had the wafers and they are always rather bland affairs. Keeping that in mind, I was mainly expecting a good textural experience from these crackers rather than strong flavor.


There are 10 packets of 3 crackers in the bag. It cost about 200 yen ($2.30) at a local snack shop and is pretty decent value for the number of servings. A packet is 49 calories for the three sembei.

The crackers don't smell like anything distinct. There is a sort of generic baked rice smell, but they're not like savory sembei because they have no soy sauce, salt, or fish flavor associated with them. My first impression is that they taste like a generic baked cereal cracker that falls somewhere between Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies. They are surprisingly, and almost unpleasantly sweet. They are similar to a type of inauthentic "galette" cookie that is often sold in Japan with a very thin layer of cream between them. It's a cross between a cookie and a cracker.

The sweetness drowns out most of the other flavors, but you can detect margarine in the mix. The first ingredient for these is flour, followed by sugar and margarine is fourth. I also can taste the plastic that the crackers are wrapped in. Perhaps these are a bit on the older side and have absorbed some of the polypropylene odor, but the expiration date was for the middle of next year so they can't be that old.

The texture on these is super crispy and satisfying, but the sweetness is just too much and the plastic flavor isn't helping. I may slowly finish these off as a tea accompaniment when I want something sweet but don't want to eat a lot of calories, but there's every chance that I may end up tossing them after eating one or two more packets.

Kashiwado Jumbo Black Sugar Bread

Most of my snack shopping takes place in relatively predictable places like convenience stores, supermarkets or snack shops. Very occasionally, something interesting will show up in one of the local green grocer's catch-all bin of snacks and low price foods near their registers. The shop these were purchased at is a bit grungy, but the prices for vegetables, fruit, and meat are low. The snack foods in the big bin are often a jumble, and sometimes look worse for wear. The boxes can actually look beat up, scratched, or worn on some foods; it's like someone kept them in the back of their cupboard for a few months then decided to sell them.


Normally, I ignore the snacks at this green grocer, but my husband plucked this bag of brown sugar bread out of the bin while he was foraging for Portuguese strawberry cookies that they had recently started carrying. The shop I bought this from is called Takano and we paid 198 yen ($2.20) for a package with 10. Each is 20 grams (.7 oz.) and 7.5 cm. x 5.5 cm. (3 in. x 1.2 in.) in size. I'm not sure if you can call that size "jumbo" or not, but they are big for a cookie-like treat in Japan.


Though these are called "bread", this is one of those times when translation doesn't work very well. These are more like a cross between a bread and a cookie. They are a variation on the classic Japanese "tamago pan" (egg bread). That means they are firm, dense, and have a somewhat crispy exterior with a dry, but tender interior. They are a small carbohydrate bomb, and eating them is as much about texture as taste. The ingredients include flour, brown sugar, white sugar, egg, and margarine.

These smell of molasses and brown sugar and unsurprisingly taste fairly strongly of brown sugar and molasses. They are quite sweet, but not in a throat-burning way. Like other types of tamago pan, they have a slightly crispy exterior, and a dry, cookie-like interior. They are very satisfying with a cup of coffee or tea as a more substantial snack.

I liked these a lot, but I love the sort of dense, dry cookie-like interior these have. They remind me of the sugar cookies my mother used to make, which were not your usual crispy, sweet sugar cookie. I find the texture of tamago pan immensely satisfying. The flavor of these is icing on the cake. I can recommend them without reservation to people who like similar types of food, but I'm not sure they'd be a knock-out winner with just anyone.