Nabisco Oreo Green Tea Chocolate

Since returning to the U.S., I've learned that Oreo cookies are to the American market what KitKats once were to the Japanese one. If there's a crazy flavor variation to be found in a sweet, you can generally count on Nabisco to come up with something. I'm shocked at how many versions of Oreo-brand treats there are available on a regular basis, and surprised by the limited edition flavors like birthday cake, candy cane, and gingerbread. That being said, Oreos are sold in enormous packages. My husband bought a gingerbread one around the beginning of December and it still has between 1/3 and 1/4 left. It's a good thing they have a long shelf life because it takes us forever to eat through a package and we don't have a pet pig to feed things to.

Such issues are not a problem with Oreos in Japan. Not only are they limited in the scope of their releases, but the size of any given offering is quite small. This green tea chocolate Oreo snack has only eight 5.9 gram (.2 oz.) pieces. They are two small bites and only 32 calories each. This makes them close to the Oreo equivalent of a Hershey's Kiss in terms of overall size. So, this stuff isn't likely to be lying around for 5 months. Well, it might if it really sucks.

The beauty of mixing green tea with something like an Oreo cookie is that it is where sweet meets bitter. The odd thing is that most of the sweetness is coming from the green tea chocolate that is binding fractured bits of bitter chocolate Oreo cookies together. While I have not been the greatest fan of green tea sweets in the past, they have really started to grow on me and this one hit all of the right spots.

The smell when you open the package comes mostly from the green tea. The flavor is a very good mix of both the chocolate and the tea with the tea dominating at first and the cocoa flavor coming second. It's nice that such a tiny bite has a couple of flavor notes rather than lacking depth. The other thing which really hits me the right way is the textural contrast between the soft green tea chocolate and the crispy cookies. It's satisfyingly crunchy without being brittle or too hard.

If you hate green tea, you probably will not be a fan of this. It's definitely strong enough on the tea meter to put off anyone who isn't a fan. If you are a fan though, this is really good and worth a try. I got this courtesy of the fine folks at Candy-san. They are currently selling it for 210 yen, which is probably only about 50 yen more than it retails for in Japan and less than I'd have to pay for it in a Japanese market here. If you don't like them, at least your pet pig won't get fat if you feed him the leftovers. 

Chestnut Oreo Chocolate Bar

Back when I was a kid, in the late 1400's, "Oreo" meant one kind of cookie. Of course, when I was a kid, it meant one kind of cookie that my mother never bought because we were too poor for name brand snacks. When she bought "sandwich cookies", they were the store or generic brands which came in enormous packages and cost 99 cents. There were usually three rows of them, two ostensibly chocolate and one supposedly vanilla. Neither really tasted like much. In fact, the chocolate ones tasted like some sort of alkali mixture with minimal amounts of cocoa. The vanilla tasted like sugar and flour-like substances.

So, it wasn't until I'd matured and gotten employment that I actually ate an Oreo. In fact, I'm pretty sure I never ate one until I came to Japan and at that point they were rather hard to locate. So, unlike the rest of you over-privileged snackers who grew up with your Hostess snacks, Nestle's Crunch bars, and Oreos, I don't have a nostalgic attachment to them. That whole twist and make a double-stuff thing? It doesn't work nearly as well with cheap cookies which tended to crack and break apart when you attempted this. Also, the gritty cream filling wasn't really the type of thing you'd want to double up on.

So, I am filled with bitterness and resentment at all of you who have a nostalgic sense of consuming a pure Oreo cookie and can look back on the experience with child-like delight. On the other hand, I can approach this chocolate bar without any of your emotional "baggage" and not focus at all on how this is less than it's parent product. I can experience it without making comparisons. So, there!

The bar smells a lot like Oreo cookies and cheap chocolate. Considering that constitutes 95% of the bar, since the package claims that 5% is chestnut, that is no surprise. The quantity of cookies inside is quite generous and brings the bitter chocolate nature and crispy cookie goodness of part of the Oreo cookie that is less likely to send you into sugar shock. The first bite or two is largely chocolate on chocolate with something else just at the end. There is a slight finishing flavor of chestnut. At first, it is very, very faint, but the flavor intensity slowly builds up as you eat more of the bar. By the end, you have a much better sense of the chestnut aspect.

It's rare for me to eat an entire chocolate bar at once, but this is a flat bar which doesn't seem so heavy or filling. It's 190 calories for 34 grams (1.2 oz.). The texture really is the main draw and it's quite satisfying on that front. However, I don't think this is a cut above a normal Oreo chocolate bar. There just isn't enough of a chestnut punch going on. I think it would have been more impressive if the coating were chestnut rather than chocolate, but it is what it is, and, yeah, I'd buy it again because it's a nice bar regardless of it's lack of strong novel flavor.

Oreo Soft Cookie

Note that the bag was open before I took the picture. I couldn't wait to try them until I had a camera.

I blame the purchase of this mundane review fodder and the expansion of any fat cells firmly on Marvo at The Impulsive Buy. I've gone a very long time ignoring this offering from Nabisco because I figured any Oreo product which was not an original cookie was bound to be sub-par. I've tried a few things here that have been offered as members of the extended Oreo family, but I have not been impressed with the original product's offspring. Marvo mentioned that Oreo Cakesters, which I'd hoped these would resemble, were like Hostess Ding Dongs or cupcakes and I wanted that blast from the past.

The cookies are tiny at 4 cm (1.6 in.) in diameter and you get 8 of them per bag. I paid 168 yen for them at the discount snack shop Okashi no Machioka. Even with the discount, that's pretty expensive for a small number of tiny cookies. Each cookie is about 80 calories, despite being such a tiny morsel.

The soft, dense cookie exterior has a slight bit of the bitter chocolate essence of an original Oreo cookie, but it's more muted. It's lightly sweet and the filling is mostly about texture. It adds a creamy, fatty contrast to the soft, yet slightly dry cookie exterior. Frankly, the outside of the cookie is like a dry Oreo-flavored brownie. This is not a bad thing, but it would be the sort of brownie that is created to have a long shelf life with all that tends to mean - a slight chemical aftertaste, dryness, and moistness that comes mainly from transfats.

I liked these, despite how the aforementioned paragraph may come across. I've read that Japanese Oreos are less sweet than American ones and I'll have to take everyone's word for it because I never ate Oreos in the U.S. and can only recall how they taste here. This truly is a soft cookie version of an Oreo with a slightly less bitter cookie and slightly less dense and sweet filling. It's good for what it is, and not a bad snack to have on hand for a specific kind of craving. They're no Ding Dong or Hostess cupcake, but they're still pretty good.

Oreo Banana Bar

One of the reasons a brand grows to become the pinnacle of its product type is that it manages to strike the majority of people as the best in show for its particular breed. When it comes to the chocolate sandwich cookie competition, most of the judges have voted the Oreo as top dog.

For me personally, I didn't grow up eating Oreos like most kids. As I've mentioned in other posts, we were too poor for the more expensive brand name products. We were too poor for the second rate sandwich cookie, Hydrox. No, we were stuck with the store brands which had bland, soft cookie exteriors and overly sweet, chalky interiors. Such was the "deprivation" of my youth.

It wasn't until I became an adult, and indeed, when I came to Japan, that I occasionally indulged in authentic Oreo cookies. Here, they come is small packages with about 18 cookies per bag. They're not available at all stores. Indeed, in my area, you're hard-pressed to find them when the craving hits. At any rate, the main selling point of the Oreo is that the cookie outside is just the right combination of crispy bitter chocolate cookie to pair up with the sweet evil of the creamy center. This is its strength.

The whole notion of Oreo candy bars and those flavored with fake fruit seems to fly in the face of the simple perfection of the sweet and bitter cookie combo. Nabisco can't resist trying though. After all, if you've got a popular brand, it's pretty much an obligation to exploit it. Hence, we have this dubious candy bar and a few of its siblings, the green tea Oreo and macadamia Oreo bars.

I should note that my husband wanted to buy this as part of his sampling of all of the banana-flavored sweets that are crowding the shops this year. We found this for about 130 yen (about $1.25) at an AM/PM convenience store. Needless to say, there are more banana food reviews to come in the future.


The bar smells strongly of fake banana flavor. This completely overwhelms any possible chocolate scent, if indeed there is any. The coating on this looks, feels and tastes like mockolate, but cocoa butter is the second ingredient so I'm guessing it's the real deal. The coating is relatively thin compared to the crumbly, crunchy interior mess. Though it is nice and crispy, the inside crumbles too much. It's as if the grains are highly compressed to hold the interior together rather than it being some sort of cohesive cookie center.

The taste is a little bit of the usual Oreo bitter cocoa cookie flavor mixed with super strong fake banana which oddly had a bit of a watermelon type finishing flavor. I think this was simply a byproduct of the chemicals used in the flavoring. Note that real banana flavoring is supposed to be a part of this so I could be saying "fake banana" when it's actually real. That being said, it tastes to me like some of the worst fake banana crap I've ever had.

The bar weighs 36.5 grams (about 1.3 oz.) and contains 199 calories. I ate just a smidge off the end and my husband ate about half of it and put the rest away for future consumption. He actually liked it. On a scale of 1-10, he gave it a 6 with 5 being an "average" candy bar eating experience. As for my rating, if he weren't going to eat it, I'd have simply thrown the rest away. I give it "unhappy" instead of "very unhappy" because I figure someone who loves banana flavored treats (like my husband) might find it more palatable than I did.

Nabisco Spicy Barbeque "Potato Crisps"

The Onion has an AV Club feature called "Taste Test". For the most part, they tend to cover things which they expect to be pretty bad. I've found that doing a food review blog sort of encourages this sort of perverse seeking out of the sort of food stuffs that most sensible people would avoid. Though one might assume that those who have a chance to taste a lot of different things may seek out more exotic experiences, I don't think this has anything to do with boredom. I believe it has everything to do with the fact that you get a lot more mileage out of bad food than good food when you're writing.

In the spirit of buying something which I expected to be bad, I picked up the bag of "potato crisps" pictured above for 99 yen ($1.00). Two points about it drew my attention. First of all, it is made by Nabisco and I rarely see or buy their products in Japan. Though they are well known in the United States, they don't have nearly such an expansive product line-up here. I believe their best known item is the Picola cookie which is a thin rolled up sugar cookie filled with various types of "cream".

The second point that caught my attention was the name of the product. Since the Japanese use "potato chips" in Japanese, there is no reason to name these "crisps" unless one is British or these aren't real chips. If they're not real chips, then whatever processed concoction they turn out to be may be more interesting (though probably less tasty) than an actual chip.

When I opened the bag, I was greeted by carefully processed "crisps". They are different shapes and sizes and they're ridged just like a normal ridge cut potato chip might be. However, they are bumpy all over in a way you don't see from frying, but rather from uniform baking and rising. Sure enough, these are Pringles-style processed chips without the orderliness or the can.

The smell when you open the bag is intensely spicy. There's a melange of flavors so it's hard to identify any one scent. There is a hint of tomato in the smell, but not in the ingredients list. The primary ingredient is "potato flakes" and the flavorings include pork extract powder, soy sauce, and "sauce" powders. My guess is that the vague "sauce" is where the tomato comes from and it's meant to be generic barbeque sauce flavoring.

The first bite is spicy and salty and a bit overwhelming. As you eat a few more, you get a strong sense of a meaty flavor and with a ketchup chaser. The chips are very crispy and light, though they are still very fattening. One bag is 65 grams (2.2 oz.) and 348 calories. There's a slight artificial aftertaste, but it's not nearly as strong as you get from Pringles processed chips.

I liked these just fine. If my options were limited and I wanted a salted snack, this would certainly come out ahead of a lot of other contenders. If I wanted a spicy chip, I'd take this over a better plain potato chip and I'd certainly put it near the top of the processed chips I've tried, but I'd still opt for Lay's or another big brand barbeque over these.