Shirakiku Dorayaki (with chestnuts)

During the last eight months of my time in Japan, I taught a sweet old lady who used to bring me gifts on a regular basis. She told me that her favorite sweet was dorayaki. This was a woman who, when I told her that I was leaving Japan, started to cry and continued to do so throughout most of the remainder of the lesson. I learned from that experience to tell my students about my departure at the end of the lesson.

Because this woman was so emotional about my leaving and so sweet to me, I always associate this particular Japanese treat with her. I was her favorite teacher - when I told her that I'm sure she'd find another very nice teacher when I was gone, but she said, "but, I love you!" - and this was her favorite snack. I have to say, given how hard my departure was for her, I feel a little guilty every time I see dorayaki. It's not a happy association, but it is a reminder that teachers are not just monkeys who entertain in English to the Japanese people who they associate with. That's just who we are to other foreigners who have no respect for us.

I realize that's a bit of a downer to start a post off with, but they can't all be about mascots with large crotch plates or delirious yet non-drug inspired stories about other mascots. No, no. Sometimes, this is serious business despite the sugar- and salt-drenched nature of my work here.

For those who don't recall from my other single review of dorayaki, these are pancake-like cakes with red bean paste in the middle. Mine promised to be studded with lavish and large bits of chestnut as well. All of this was available at the sale price of $2.99 (about 300 yen), which is about as cheap as dorayaki ever gets around here. Usually, these go for $5-6 a pack in my area.

One of the reasons that I haven't reviewed dorayaki much in the past is that I have a lack of love for the type of cake on the exterior. It tends to be dry and sticky. It's supposed to be modeled on or similar to castella, which I am not a big fan of. This particular version does have the tacky exterior of castella, but it's not as dry inside. In fact, the cake portion was fluffier than usual and that made it much more enjoyable.

The filling though, was not quite as promised. I realize that this is a smallish picture for detail, but there is not an enormous collection of chestnut pieces in there. The illustration may show them in there like nuggets in a gold miner's pan, but they are pretty thoroughly integrated in the real deal. That doesn't mean this was bad. The red bean jam filling is actually quite tasty. It doesn't have as many large, un-mashed beans as these sometimes do, but it is slightly coarse in texture. I've had better anko, but this is absolutely not bad anko. The sweetness balance between the somewhat bland exterior and sweet interior is quite good. I also enjoyed the textural contrast between the cake and filling.

This is not the best dorayaki to ever come down the pike, but it was certainly very tasty and brought a nice sense of nostalgia as well as an enjoyable tea time. If you're a fan of red bean sweets and have never tried these, this is a good and relatively economical place to start. If you like this, then you can move up the scale to something handmade from a Japanese sweets shop (if you have access to one). I'd certainly have these again.

Shirakiku Koban Sembei (Cheese)

I'd seen these rice crackers (sembei) hanging around the racks at Daiso Japan for awhile and ignored them because they had a fluorescent pink $1.00 sticker on them. I figured that, in a shop that usually sells things for $1.50, there had to be something wrong with them for the price to be marked down.

However, my desire for cheesy goodness coupled with what I saw as a funny name overrode any apprehension I had. And, yes, I realize how ridiculous it is to have any hesitation about spending a buck on a bag of snack crackers, but I've had far too many unfinished packages in my life from a lack of judiciousness in these situations. As someone who is borderline obsessed with not wasting things (I save broccoli stems and asparagus stalks to make soup because I can't stand to toss them out), I feel bad about just tossing things out. That's probably why there are so few of the "unhappy" and "very unhappy" ratings on this blog as they mean that I decided simply to throw something away. I always try to finish.

At any rate, the name of these reminds me of Japanese police boxes which are called koban. I imagined that these were the snack of choice for men who spent their days giving people directions and stopping people to ask if they'd stolen their bikes. In essence, I liked to imagine that these were to Japanese cops as donuts are to American ones.

However, my banal little fantasy is stopped in its tracks by the fact that the words are the same, but the kanji (Chinese characters) are different. This isn't this koban - 交番 it's that koban - 小判. If you can't read that and it shows up as gibberish for you, it doesn't matter because I'm just going to say that the latter refers to an oval coin used during the feudal Edo period in Japan. Bummer. It was funnier to imagine portly cops with salt-covered fingers talking about the latest results of the Yomiuri Giants while ordering a young compatriot to go chase down a foreigner and make him prove he's not a criminal.

My lazy cop fantasies dashed, I sat down and tried my super cheap sembei and was pleasantly surprised. These crackers are a flavor burst of pleasantly pungent cheesy goodness with a nice dose of what I can only call a meaty (umami) kick. The second bite starts in with some smoked cheese flavor. They are not too much of anything and that allows the flavor depth to come through.

The meaty flavor probably comes courtesy of MSG, but cheese is nowhere to be found in the ingredients list. It does include a handful of chemicals including "artificial flavor" and aspartame. Though they don't taste especially sweet, they do include sugar and glucose syrup in addition to the aforementioned artificial sweetener. All in all, these could put the "junk" in junk food.

Despite their nutritional shortcomings, I've already bought these twice and would buy them again. I love the cheesy flavor with savory undertones as well as the good portion control of the individual packages with two crackers each (25 calories). They're also very economical as a sembei option and the Daiso Japan is one of the easier haunts for me to reach if I'm in the mood for some rice cracker lovin'. While Amazon carries a lot of Shirakaku's Japanese food products, they, unfortunately, do not carry the cheese sembei.