Random Picture #214

I hear the word "Oreo" several times a day every day. I wish I could say that was because I worked in an Oreo factory or even that I was employed creating new and bizarre flavors for them to put in their limited edition offerings. Unfortunately, it's because my neighbors in the building across the way got a little black dog with a white strip down its breast and they frequently are yelling at it by name, and the name they gave it is "Oreo".

In Japan, they do not have a ton of strange Oreo cookie flavors. I'm stunned at how many Oreo cookies are in the regular rotation, let alone all of the seasonal and limited edition flavors like fruit punch, gingerbread, and rice krispies treat flavors. Instead of offering a ton of different cookies, Nabisco Japan has these cookie/candy logs that they offer in odd flavors. The one picture above next to what looks like a bowl of pizza toppings is "creme brulee". It's made with Hokkaido milk, just as I'm sure original French versions of creme brulee were made with that sort of extra special milk. 

Haitai Chocolate Cookie Bar

If someone decided to create the written equivalent of esparanto, that is, a writing system that everyone could use as a common form of  communication, but was no ones native language, would you want to learn it? Would you be willing to memorize the characters and learn to type and write them? If it were possible, what are the chances that we could get all the peoples of the world to make the effort? I can't speak for everyone, but I'm pretty sure that a lot of the English speakers wouldn't trouble themselves since they currently possess the dominant language for international exchanges. Why should they bother?

I think about things like this when I look at a package like the one this candy bar came in and think about the fact that I can't read anything on it. Unlike the Japanese, the Koreans don't alway splash a bit of English here and there to give us a clue of what is going on. And, unlike Japanese, I can't understand a single Korean character, but my brain tries to shape them into Chinese ones in an effort to try. This does not work at all, and only increases the depth of the furrowed wrinkle between my eyebrows that becomes more pronounced with each passing year.

I picked this up at a Korean market for a mere 79 cents because the concept reminded me of a Japanese candy I've had and reviewed before called "Black Thunder." This is a kid's candy which is fairly cheap and had a surge of popularity around the time that I was leaving in March 2012 because the maker, Yuraku, hitched its wagon to the Japanese men's gymnastics team and I believe a particular athlete (whose name I do not know) said it was his favorite candy. He may have been a baseball player. He may have played soccer. I don't know. I only know that he wasn't a sumo wrestler and I'm pretty sure that getting your candy endorsed by one of them wouldn't necessarily be perceived as good for the brand as no one would want to think candy has the chance of making you gain weight.

At any rate, if you compare the pictures from my review of Black Thunder to this bar's pictures, you'll see that they are quite different inside. Black Thunder has much bigger chunks of cookie and some cereal. This is smaller, denser bits of cookie bound by chocolate.

The chocolate candy portion is not especially sweet and mainly seems to serve as a somewhat dryly finished bonding material for the cookie bits. This is not a bad thing as the cookies carry a lot of the nice somewhat bitter chocolate flavor of the sandwich cookie that an Oreo has. The textural contrast is also pretty good with some solid, but not brittle, crunch from the cookies and some yielding, but firm sense from the chocolate. Even though there is no "cream" portion, there seems to be somewhat of a similar flavor in the bar which carries the same sweetness.

I think this bar is better than the Japanese one because the chocolate is less waxy and the chocolate flavor more pronounced. Both have great textural qualities, but the cocoa seems to be a bit higher quality in the Haitai cookie bar. For 170 calories for a relatively lightweight bar though, this packs more of a calorie cost. It'd be a toss up which I'd go for. This wins for taste, but Black Thunder is lighter and wins for the calorie to enjoyment ratio. Either is a good deal and I'd recommend picking one up if you can - especially if you're a fan of the cookie part of an Oreo.

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. 

Random Picture #125

Photo courtesy of BlogD (used with permission).

The "Cream Clan" sounds like the less threatening cousin to the KKK. Where one hurts minorities and espouses white supremacy, the other simply plies you with hydrogenated fats and waits for your arteries to slowly clog up. Instead of burning crosses on lawns, they'd probably dump bags of sugar in the hopes of attracting carpenter ants to your property and slowly taking down your house. The members of the Cream Clan would be far more patient about how they destroy their enemies (and those enemies would be those freaks out there who eschew junk food and eat whole food and fresh fruit and vegetables).

This shot from a convenience store (taken very recently by my brother-in-law who lives in Japan) features a peanut cream cookie and an, obvious, Oreo knock-off. If I were in Japan at this moment, I'd do what he did and take a picture of the funny name and possibly buy the peanut one. My expectation would be that it would not be very good, but since there is so little in the way of peanut butter sweets, I'd toss my 100 yen ($1.27) into the cash register with minimal hopes that something good might come of it.

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 Bits "Ice Flavor" (Lemon)

Ice is made of water and water tastes like pretty much nothing. If these cookies were actually "ice flavor(ed)", then they'd taste like nothing, right? We can thank this confusing naming convention on the energy conservation efforts which I have mentioned before. Marketers are going crazy trying to fool people into thinking eating, drinking, or fanning themselves with various products will produce coolness. Suffice it to say, you may have better luck cooling off with these Oreos if you fanned their tiny little selves than if you ate them. Eating does produce a thermic response, after all, and the very act of ingesting calories will warm you up.

Setting aside the dumb attempt to make you think these cookies are going to cool you off, they are actually pretty tasty. They are lemon cream-filled Oreos with a sweet, tart and bitterness combination that has depth as well as a good textural combo with the crunchy cookies and smooth, soft creamy center. The lemon is strong enough to compete favorably with the bitter chocolate cookie exterior, but not so much as to clash. The sweetness level is right about where it needs to be to balance everything out.

I found these cookies at a local convenience store for 103 yen (about $1.25 for a 60-gram (a little over 2 oz.) bag. This gets you 20 cookies at about 15 calories a cookie (296 calories for the entire bag). The pricing is rather peculiar since stores usually don't price such that you'll have to fish out one-yen coins. I'm not going to argue with it though as it is a little cheaper than expected for this portion size (at least in Japan).

I really enjoyed these, as did my husband, but a lot depends on how you feel about the lemon and chocolate combination. Some people love the mix of citrus and chocolate and others rather not so much. It also depends a lot on how you feel about the particular combination of Oreo bitter chocolate cookies with such flavors, but I found it very much to my liking. I'm also a great fan of this sort of portion size because sometimes after a meal, I just want a bite or two of a cookie and these somewhat larger than a dime/one-yen coin cookies really do the trick.

Just a gentle reminder that there is a contest running for two weeks to win a few snack and snack-related goodies. If you'd like to enter, the details are in this post.

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.

Maxim Cafe Menu (Oreo, Mont Blanc)

When I lived back home, I used to buy General Foods International Coffees. I didn't have any moments to 'celebrate', but they made adequate sugar-free instant coffee. At that point in time, I was a coffee wuss and couldn't stomach the real stuff. Those flavored coffees are like training wheels...okay, perhaps more like tricycles that your parents are holding onto the back of while you ride around tentatively. They give you a thimble of coffee, a ton of fake flavor, a lot of powdered milk and gobs of artificial sweetener. I'm guessing one has no more than a smattering of coffee beans worth of actual coffee...okay, perhaps no more than a smattering of coffee-flavored chemicals.

Since "graduating" to "the hard stuff" (aka real coffee), I haven't bought many flavored instant coffees. Part of the reason for that is that I live in Japan, where sugar-free versions of such things don't exist so a small serving of instant coffee brings with it gobs of actual sugar instead of chemicals that are meant to fool you into thinking you're having sugar. Another reason is that such things are expensive for piddly amounts of warm, brown liquid.

I was strolling around Peacock supermarket when the Maxim Oreo cafe latte mix and I couldn't resist. The Mont Blanc was hanging out next to it so I decided to toss it in as well. Each box cost 158 yen ($1.94) for 5 servings of the Oreo flavor and 4 of the Mont Blanc. I don't know why one has more than the other, but I think it's because one is more elegant fake coffee and the other low-brow junk food fake coffee.

I didn't take a picture of the coffee after I made it because it looks like coffee. There was really nothing to see so I justified being slack about the pictures. Imagine any of the billions of images of coffee out there and visualize one. There, you got it.

Both make a small amount of coffee. You add 130 ml. of hot water to the powder in each tube. I tried the Mont Blanc first and it didn't taste like much of anything. If you added a teaspoon of regular brewed coffee to reconstituted powdered milk with just the barest whisper of chestnut, that's what it is. It isn't particularly sweet, which is either a plus or a minus depending on how you like such things. I tried it with a little sweetener to see if making it sweeter would bring out more of the chestnut, but it just made it sweeter which totally drowned out the minimal coffee and whispery chestnut flavor.

The Oreo flavored coffee was a different kettle of fish, which is not to say that it tasted like fish. It did, however, make a strange crackling noise when I added in the powder. I think that if you were trying to create some sort of faux witches brew situation for Halloween with accompanying sound effects, this would do it for you. Though both of these are labeled "latte", the Oreo version was a lot darker and had a stronger coffee flavor as well as what tasted like essence of cookie crumbs mixed into it. That may not sound too bad, but the problem is that bitter chocolate Oreo cookie crumbs without the sweet creamy filling doesn't work so well. If you add bitter (coffee) to bitter (chocolate cookie), you get a strange combination. It's not bad, but it's not good. At least this tastes like something though, which is more than I can say for the Mont Blanc version.

Neither of these coffees lit my fire, and I definitely wouldn't buy them again. At about 65 calories per 3/4 cup serving, I'm not inclined to waste my precious snacking allotment on these. I'm not even sure that I'll finish these two boxes. They don't have to be bad to get stuck at the back of my snack basket and collect dust. They just don't have to be good and these are incredibly so-so.

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.