Yuki & Love Mango Mochi

Have you ever been in a situation in which someone tries very hard to convince you of something and the more they try to get you to believe them, the less you do? If your friend was trying to get you to go on a date with another friend, you'd probably become suspicious if they used too many superlatives. "He's a great guy, really. He works hard, has a great job, and is trustworthy. He's the best cook I've ever known. He's great, really!"

By the second "really," your suspicions are going to be aroused and you won't be shocked when you meet him and find he has an enormous horned toad tattooed on his face and is still living at home with his mother. He probably also has a collection of pet reptiles in his basement "bachelor pad," and an unabashedly displayed collection of adult diaper pron. No, I'm not speaking from real life experience, fortunately.

I think that there is an inverse relationship between how good something actually is and its claims of how good it is. This not only applies to dates, but also to food. I should have thought of that before buying this mango mochi, but Asian food so often has such claims earnestly displayed on it that I've learned to tune it out. This one says, "Tastes good, absolutely delicious products." If that weren't enough, there is a little crown on it that says, "King of the Tawiwan mochi." That was the one that should have told me that this was a potential toad-faced loser with a stack of diaper porn.

Perhaps I'm being a bit too harsh on this, but I did have somewhat high expectations. I found this at "Ranch 99" Asian market for around $2.00 (200 yen) and was happy to find a new flavor among the more common taro, sesame, peanut, brown sugar, and green tea. I wished I'd tried the green tea instead.

The mochi itself was actually quite good. It is tiny - about the diameter of an American quarter or a little bigger than a Japanese 100-yen coin - and only 90 calories per serving, but it manages to pack a little funk into its petit package. The mochi is soft, fresh, and nicely chewy, but the thick jelly-like center which is supposed to be mango has a strange taste to it.

This starts out okay with a bland flavor that becomes sweeter as you get more of the center flavor. It is definitely mango, but the finishing flavor is polluted by something which tastes like melon, but not any melon that you'd want to eat. I'm guessing this flavor comes from the cassava starch in the ingredients list, but I've never had cassava so I don't know what it actually tastes like. All I know is that something ruins a fairly promising mochi and I'm going to say the cassava is the toad tattoo on an otherwise decent-looking face because most of the other ingredients are sugar (maltose, water, sugar, cassava starch, mango juice, gelatine, glucose, sorbic acid, natural flavor, and a bunch of artificial colors). The weird thing is that that is mochi, but there's no rice listed!

I may choke down one or two more of these, but chances are I'll spring them on unsupecting visitors or throw the rest out. Life is too short for weird-tasting fruit mochi. I'm sure you'll see that on a bumper sticker one day, just as I'm sure you'll meet someone with a toad tattooed on his face (likely sooner rather than later given how many people tattoos there are in America these days).

Yuki & Love Japanese Style Sesame Mochi

My experiences with "Yuki & Love" brand mochi snacks has been a very mixed bag. In fact, I started off flying high on their blobs of goo-filled rice cake with their taro mochi. It was all a thundering downhill ride from there. They even ruined peanut butter mochi for me. It was like one of those friendships that start out great and, not so slowly, you find yourself bored and then repulsed by the idea of spending time with a person. In the end, you're putting them off when they ask you to spend time with them because you're dreading the experience.

The truth is that I was treating this box of sesame mochi like such a bad friendship. It has been in my possession for five months and is currently past its expiration date of June 2013 by a fair margin. I feel obliged to say that because, clearly, I'm not having this at its best.

In fact, I may not even be having it when it is safe to eat. However, my feeling is that these packages are sealed pretty well and there are little oxygen absorbing packets in them. If I don't go blind or projectile vomit, then it probably is okay to eat. Mind you, I would only do this with a sealed product. If it had been open for five months, I wouldn't be eating it now. Suffice it to say, this is not a "do as I do" sort of thing. I don't recommend anyone eat expired mochi. Don't try this at home, kids!

Fortunately, there were no infestations of insects in the package and I couldn't perceive visible growth on them. In fact, it looked pretty innocuous in there. My main concern was that the mochi would have gone very, very stale. That being said, the other Yuki & Love mochi snacks which I didn't care for tasted stale even when they were supposedly on the fresh side.

I'm happy to say that this was actually pretty good, especially given its status as aged mochi. In fact, the mochi texture was better than my previous two experiences. It was relatively soft and easy to chew. No, it was not like fresh, handmade stuff, but this is shelf-stable and much cheaper - not to mention the fact that I can get it at Ranch 99 Asian market any time rather than make a special trip to the nearest Japan town.

The mochi was pretty pleasant cold, and downright pliable and almost fresh when popped in the microwave for a few seconds. I tried it both cold and (too) hot and I preferred the filling cold and the mochi warm. The sesame coating on the outside added a nice nutty quality as well as the unique flavor that comes from the roasted black seeds. The interior is a little on the milder side for sesame, but still quite flavorful. It lacks intensity and richness, but is not bland.

I would absolutely buy this version of Yuki & Love's mochi again. In fact, I'd say that it is very serviceable and a good variety to keep around for emergency mochi cravings. Yes, I realize that only I actually have those... well, me and possibly pregnant Japanese women. Each little blob is 130 calories, which is not low for the size, but is pretty good for something which contains seeds (which are fatty and high calorie relatively speaking).

It seems that sometimes you avoid a "friend" because you expect to have a bad time, but then you discover that good times can be had after all. Next time, I'll try not to wait until the snack is two and a half months past its expiration date to give it a go.

Yuki & Love Japanese Style Peanut Mochi

Have you ever wondered which part of an Oreo cookie makes the cookie better? Is it the slightly bitter, not terribly sweet and crispy outer cookie or the creamy, sweet death-mush in the center. If eating habits are any indication, that is, our tendency to mush together two cookies divorced of one half of their outer cookie sandwich, then the filling is the star of the show. That being said, in Japan, they used to sell only the outer cookie sans the sugary goo. Tastes are relative, after all.

When thinking about mochi treats, one can ask the same question, though I'm figuring those that are not aficionados of Japanese traditional sweets would say, "neither". Those who are connoisseurs would likely say, "both." As someone who just buys snacks for a living, I'm definitely saying the proof is in the rice cake (mochi) and that a substandard mochi experience will make or break the experience. 

The peanut filling of this is lightly sweet, dense, and pretty fatty. The texture is rich, but it's a little kludgy, like "natural" peanut butter before it has been stirred (though not quite that bad). The mochi is where things fall apart. It's actually nicely balanced in terms of taste and lends a sweetness from the rice cake having been infused with a bit of sugar and a nuttiness due to the powder on the exterior. The place where it all goes wrong is the mochi's texture.

The first time I tried a "Yuki & Love" Japanese style mochi, I loved it. It was soft and tasty with a delicate taro (like a potato, only, not) filling. I was so excited that I was dying to try another flavor and scooped up boxes of other varieties when I found them on sale. The second time was a more so-so experience, but that was largely due to the weirdness of the brown sugar flavor in that one. This time, the mochi was just crummy. It was too thick and rubbery, like chewy on the eraser on the end of a number 2 pencil. I don't know if this was old or if they just did a bad job on this particular one, but it really ruined the experience. Despite being quite good with the flavor (and being an enormous fan of all things peanut butter), I didn't finish the box. I kept going back and trying them, even microwaving them to soften the thick exterior, but it didn't help. I ended up throwing out half of the box because they just weren't worth the 130 calories per rubbery lump.

I hope this was a "bad batch", but I'm unlikely to try this variety again. I'm not giving up on the brand and will try another, but if it doesn't get better after the next sampling, I'll be saying goodbye to "Yuki & Love", or at least their Japanese style mochi offerings.

Yuki & Love Brown Sugar Mochi

Writing a blog sometimes causes you to face problems that most others don't have to think about. For instance, the name of the maker of this product is "Yuki & Love". When I tried to use the name of the company as a part of the title of the post, Blogger threw up a red flag and said that I could not pass "Go" and I would not be given my $200 (aka, it wouldn't save my post with that name).

As you can imagine, it's a bit perplexing to see how my title so offends the Blogger gods, but I actually did know what it was on about. This is one of those dumb things about computers that you don't think about until it steps up and smacks you in the face. Blogger's glove slap to my cheek was the result of using an ampersand (&) character in a title. What was worse than that was the fact that it had a digital hissy fit was that it did it on a post I'd written on a Mac, but not on a similarly named post that I'd written on a PC (yes, I'm "bi-platform", call me a pervert if you like... in fact, I'd like it if you did call me a pervert).

This is one of those "under the hood" issues that makes no sense unless you're someone who has lived on the deeper edge of the computer-using continuum, and while, I'm no geek, I have had to tussle with these problems before as part of my work in publishing textbooks. All of these letters that are showing up on your screen have various codes and such associated with them and, while it may look like an ampersand is an ampersand to our eyes, the computer begs to differ with our assessment of such things. What you're seeing isn't necessarily what is being gotten. (Yes, I solved the problem by choosing a different ampersand with a different code from the Mac's character palette. Even though they looked the same, one choked the system and the other went down nice and smooth.)

Such is the case with this "Japanese style brown sugar mochi". What I seem to be seeing is a super creamy center that is just barely failing to ooze out of it's pounded rice cake wrapping. It looks like a chocolately delight, though, of course it's actually brown sugar. What I saw on the front of the box though, was not precisely what I got. 

Opening the package and seeing the dusty little balls with a scuffed tops filled me with a sense of foreboding. Cutting one in half to reveal the dark innards further filled me with a notion that these were not going to be as good as my previous experience with the taro mochi. It resembles more closely what you'd scoop out of a cat's litter box than what is shown on the box with a sugary, creamy center.

One of the things I was extremely happy about when I tried the taro version was that the pounded-rice-cake  was soft and chewy as real Japanese mochi should be. I was very disappointed when I discovered that the brown sugar version has a fairly tough mochi casing. The thing that tends to make or break these types of treats is the texture as they are usually not incredibly sweet or intensely flavorful. Ideally, you get a multi-faceted experience in which you get the texture of the smooth, somewhat grainy center with the soft, chewy rice cake with subtle but pronounced flavors. This was slightly better after I gave it 5 seconds in the microwave, but I have to caution readers from repeating that procedure as these types of sweets get molten hot super fast and the center can burn your tongue pretty badly if you go just a few seconds too far in your irradiating.

Though the texture was disappointing, my main problem was with an odd flavor that came along with it. I think this funky taste may have came from the use of sulphered molasses (the sulphur acts as a preservative, but it does make the molasses taste different). However, I'm really not sure of the source of this taste. I only know that it greatly undermined the quality of the experience of eating this. It tasted generally fine and sufficiently "brown sugary", but that off flavor which seemed concentrated in the powdery coating on the outside was a real spoiler.

When I reviewed the "Yuki & Love" taro mochi, I lamented that I hadn't taken advantage of a sale at Ranch 99 Market to buy up other flavors while they were on sale. As luck would have it, all varieties were placed on sale for $1.50 a box and I scooped up a few more. Given how happy I was with the taro version, I had high hopes that the brown sugar version would make me as happy as brown sugar appears to have made the Rolling Stones in their song. Alas, it failed to meet my expectations.

This isn't really "bad" mochi, and it certainly was in line with the price point, but it also was  not especially "good" either. I'd call it a decidedly "meh" experience and I wouldn't buy it again. In fact, it's safe to say that I wouldn't really care to get a box for free, though I will likely slowly finish this box because it's still mochi.

Yuki & Love Taro Mochi

People tend to believe that something is exclusive to an area or culture because they have no experience with it in another area or culture. When they do encounter it elsewhere, they often assume it is a copy of the food from their place of origin rather than consider that they may be the ones doing the copying. Living in Japan, I encountered many people who believed Japan invented something or some cultural aspect was absolutely indigenous. Later, a little research would often reveal that something was not Japanese at all, but rather a riff or copy of some other country's culture.

This is not exactly a criticism of Japan. It's more food for thought which I hope people will set aside and chew on when they have time. Americans, because our country is relatively young and a mutt nation of people and cultures from all over the world, tend to assume things are actually not invented here. We know we didn't invent French fries, not because they have the word "French" in them, but because we didn't invent hardly any of our cuisine (and French fries are from Belgium, right?).

At any rate, I assumed that anything which I first encountered in Japan was, by default, Japanese. By doing this blog, I have discovered that many of those things are of Chinese origin if they appear to be based on foods that tend to be more predominant in Asian culture (rice, noodles. etc.) or Portugal if they tend to be based on things you would find in Europe (wheat, almonds, etc.). That being said, I never questioned the idea that mochi or any type of Japanese sweet for that matter was purely the province of the Japanese.

It turns out that I was wrong. Other Asian countries have their own variations on pounded rice cake with various fillings. I went to a small Asian market not too far from my current residence and found a pretty reasonably priced multi-pack of mochi treats and snapped it up. When I got it home, well, let's say that either I was unlucky or Chinese-style mochi isn't exactly the same as Japanese. The mochi was thicker, tougher, and the fillings were not as finely processed. I was disappointed and rather put-off by future purchases of non-Japanese style mochi treats.

When my husband and I were exploring the 99 Ranch Asian market, I was persuaded to give the whole idea another go by the low price on several boxes of "Japanese-style" mochi. At $1.50 per box of 6, it was a bargain compared to the usual pricing for such things. Also, it says "Japanese-style" on the box, so, you know, it must be the nice, soft little pillows of mochi with smooth fillings that I got used to in Japan, right?

The company that makes these is Taiwanese and their web site is in Chinese, so I have imperfect access to the information about them. They make a lot of interesting looking sweets including some with mochi and others with cake-style enclosures. If I run across other variations by this company, I'm likely to give them a try considering that they include a lot of flavors that I like like sweet potato, mango, and brown sugar. 

The flavors on offer at Ranch 99 were brown sugar, taro, peanut, and sesame. The truth is that they all sounded good, but I chose taro because I'd never had it before. I was also inspired by what I thought was a mention/review of a McDonald's taro pie on the Impulsive Buy, but I can't seem to find said review to link to. Perhaps I dreamed it, or my mad search skills are insanely bad rather than good. I wanted to get some idea of what taro tasted like, so I splashed out the buck fifty for this version.

For those who don't know, taro is a corm. That's a way of saying it's not a potato, but sort of looks like the ugly love-child of a ginger root and a tuber. Before I even sampled this taro mochi sweet, I guessed that it would probably not have much of its own flavor, but would likely be like a potato or other starchy food that tends to reflect the flavors it is prepared with. This rather defeats the purpose of wanting to sample taro, but it's not like I stood in the supermarket deeply reflecting on this when I decided to buy this. Nobody thinks that far ahead about buying a simple box of snacks, right?

The previous paragraph is my way of saying that I still have no idea was taro tastes like. I can say that this mochi sweet tastes very nice though. The flavor seemed to have a bit of a caramel note with a hint of some sort of cream. It was quite sweet, but not over the top. The mochi case was lovely and soft, just as one would expect Japanese mochi to be. This was immensely gratifying as finding a shelf stable mochi snack for a good price has been very difficult since I came to California. The Japanese-made ones that are sold in such packaging costs between $5-$7 (421-589 yen) and tend to be in fruit flavors for some reason.

I really liked these and would buy them again in a hear beat. In fact, I regretted not buying a box of each flavor after sampling this one. While I don't think that I could count on the taste of each flavor being good, I think that the basic textural components would be similar and that is often where a good mochi sweet lives or dies.

As a little reminder to readers who may have missed it, or to those who haven't gotten around to entering, I'm offering a box of the current Tokyo regional KitKats (rum raisin) as a contest prize. You can read about it and enter here. The contest ends on Christmas day 2012, so enter early, but only once, please. Also, please remember that comments are moderated so there is a delay between your making the comment and it being posted. Many people are submitting comments two or three times because they are not showing up immediately. Rest assured that your comment will be posted and it is not necessary to submit multiple times.