Imuraya Adzuki Bean Ice Pop

When I was working at Nova conversations school during my first few years in Japan, one of my students told me that she wasn't allowed to have chocolate or other sweet snacks when she was a child. She said that the only snack that she was allowed to have were bags of dried fish. The reason for this was that she had bad teeth and her parents wanted her to get added Calcium from the bones in the tiny little fish (she told me this, I don't know if they are a good source of Calcium) and they didn't want her exposed to the tooth enamel-rotting aspects of candy.

I thought of that student when I tried this bar. The main reason for this is that this bar seems like the kind of snack that you buy your kids when you don't want them to eat something more decadent. An ice bar made of beans has got to be better for you tha one made of chocolate and cream, right? Well, maybe not. This has 2 grams of protein, but so does a Fudgesicle. This has 110 calories for 70 grams and the Fudgesicle has 100 calories per 65 gram bar. This does clock in with less Sodium though (35 g. vs. 80 g.), but the Fudgesicle has less carbohydrate (17 g. vs. 24 g.). Finally, this actually has more sugars (24 g. vs. 14 g.) than a Fudgesicle. All in all, not an especially nutritious option despite the presence of beans.

I didn't look carefully at the ingredients before I bought this. For 80 cents (about 85 yen), I'm not terribly fussy and am always keen on a new experience. This is made from sugar, red beans, glucose syrup, cornstarch, and salt. In that short list, you will note that there is not type of dairy product at all. This is not a type of red bean ice cream. It is, quite literally, sweet frozen bean juice on a stick - a sort of perverted popsicle as it were.

Because this has cornstarch and beans in it, it's very grainy. Because it has no dairy, it isn't creamy at all. You cannot lick it or suck on it. You pretty much have to bite into it and chew on frozen wads of bean. Bad as that sounds, this doesn't taste bad at all as long as you like adzuki beans. On a flavor level, this is rather too sweet (no surprise with two types of sugar in there) and has only two notes - the sugar and the beans. The texture is satisfyingly thick, but easy to cleave even while frozen pretty solid.

This is a weird experience, but not in a bad way. I definitely didn't have to choke it down, but it felt a lot closer to "food" than "treat". Since I chose to eat it when I was between meals and feeling pretty hungry for something more substantial, it hit the right spot between food for fun and food to fill. That being said, if you're looking for dessert or just something to eat for fun, this is likely to let you down as it is so "beany".

I liked this fine, but I really don't think I'd buy another. If someone gave me another, I'd surely eat it eventually, but I'm not a fan of something that feels like ice cream but eats like food. The main drawback is the texture, which is weirdly gritty, followed by the somewhat overwhelming sweetness.

Tirol Green Tea Parfait (product announcement)

Over the weekend, I went to a Japanese market called Marukai. This shop is what I consider the best one in my area for two reasons. First of all, they carry more unique products than most of the other ones. Second, their prices are generally lower. That is not to say that they are akin to shopping in downtown Tokyo in either respect, but they're pretty good for not being where the action is.

During my investigation into Marukai's snack aisles, I noticed that green tea, which is always around, has exploded in popularity. Everything had a green tea version. It was insanely boring with all of those green tea chocolates and cookies. The one green tea option that they did not have and that I would have bought is this new Tirol Premium candy. Tirol says that it was released in "early July", so it may be on shelves in Japan already. 

This candy displays the levels of detail that contribute to potential flavor depth which I've come to expect from many Japanese consumer-level chocolates. The cutaway illustration shows two kinds of chocolate, green tea and white, as well as red bean paste and green tea jelly. For something that sells for 20 yen, that's quite a lot of craft work. 

Fujiya Look Matcha Mousse Chocolates

This box of chocolates came to me courtesy of Skoshbox (gratis).

Fujiya would like to have tea with you. No, really. They're talking about a tea ceremony campaign linked to a pretty swanky-looking tea house in which you can spend 90 minutes experiencing tea culture. If you live in Kyoto, Nagoya, or Tokyo, or are willing to travel to these places, you and your offspring can enjoy yourself some high-falutin' tea, or, you can plant your ass on your sofa, watch some inane T.V., and open up a box of chocolates for a less swanky and elegant, but more comfortable experience. After all, who wants to sit seiza for an hour and a half while people painstakingly prepare tea?

Skoshbox sent me this pretty much on the cusp of the point at which hot weather would have wrecked it. EbiDebby at Snack Love also reviewed it, and her candy fared far worse than mine due to the heat. My box of chocolate suffered more from sitting on my counter during a West coast heat wave than from traveling from Skoshbox's hands to mine.

On the left is green tea and adzuki and on the right is green tea and milk. 

Look has actually been impressing me lately with their candy, and this was no exception. The matcha chocolate has a mild chocolate flavor mixed with a slightly more potent green tea flavor. It's not overbearing in any way and is lightly sweet. Rather than possessing flavor depth, they fuse together to create a single entity which is neither chocolate nor green tea, but a happy combination of both.

The green tea with adzuki is a slightly different experience. The green tea is more prominent. There's something about the adzuki which  makes it emerge. I tried both o these chocolates cold and at room temperature. The cold version of the adzuki was subdued. The room temperature one was much, much stronger and had the strong earthy tones of red bean soup. I, frankly, preferred it cold.

Both of these are nice chocolates. The matcha milk one is more accessible, but both are interesting without being overbearing. I'm not sure if someone who is not a fan of matcha or adzuki would enjoy them, but someone who is should be pleased. I'd certainly have them again.

I don't know if these are still available from Skoshbox as part of their current box because the weather may have become prohibitively hot, but you might be able to get one while they last.

Awashimado Adzuki Tart

Sometimes it seemed to me that the Japanese randomly assigned English names to various things. On the front of this treat, the big characters say "tart" or "ta-ru-to". This is in no way a "tart". I know because I looked it up to be sure that I hadn't missed some sort of alternate definition of the word. Wikipedia will back me up on the fact that a tart requires a pastry base, which this does not have.

Of course, the Japanese absolutely do not need to conform to our limited Western definitions of our own words. For a country that often focuses on conformity, this reveals a bit of a rebellious streak. Kudos to them for finding a way that expresses their inner rebel while still not ruffling any feathers. When mom and dad don't see won't hurt them... unless there you're dumb enough to leave wrappers of any sort lying around the betray your illicit activities, but that really has nothing to do with red beans or tarts or even food. 

This confection is made by Awashimado, the company that makes Adzuki Bean Boy cakes, a product which I described as the Japanese equivalent of cookie dough. I probably put on an entire pound of Adzuki Bean Boy by the time I'd left Japan. After scarfing down too many of those hefty bean cakes, I wanted to sample some of the company's other products and this was one of them. 

The main benefit over this misnamed tart over the bean boy is that it is only 170 calories (whereas it's brother was a whopping 260). I certainly didn't expect as much buttery richness from this, and I didn't get it. What I did get though was a very, very sweet, thick and satisfying smooth yet hefty filling of red bean paste wrapped in a moist bit of sponge cake. The cake is similar to castella, but slightly softer and, frankly, a much better textural compliment to the filling. 

This was a wonderful variation on a Swiss cake roll and I would absolutely have it again and again, if I could find access to it. I purchased this for 98 yen ($1.24) in a Tokyo supermarket, Inageya. I'm hoping to locate some of Awashimado's line in California after I have a chance to explore the various Japan towns in San Francisco and San Jose. If you find this (or the Adzuki Bean Boy), I'd recommend picking one up and giving it a try, but do it on the spot so you don't regret buying a big stash if you end up loving them a much as I do.

(If you'd like to download some wallpapers with the cute, simple mascots that Awashimado uses to promote its foods, you can find them here.)

Awashimado Adzuki Bean Boy Cake

I chose this treat entirely for one reason and that was that "adzuki bean boy" is too cool a name for a product to pass up. In fact, I'm pretty sure that this is why a "Po Boy" sandwich is popular wherever it is popular. I'm too lazy to do research into where that might be, and I actually don't know of what the sandwich is composed. Still, I'd order one if I saw it on a menu because it has "boy" in the name. In fact, the only thing better than attaching "boy" to a product name is adding "monkey". If this had been named "Adzuki Bean Monkey", I would have bought a half dozen on the spot. If it had been "Adzuki Bean Monkey Boy," I'd have cleaned out their entire stock.

As it was, I wish I had bought more than one after sampling this. This was one lovely bean treat. In fact, to me, it tastes like what "Japanese cookie dough" would taste like if the Japanese weren't utterly grossed out by the idea of eating raw cookie dough (which they are for the most part). The outside is a soft cake like wrapping with little to add to the experience other than a neat packaging. The center is super moist and sweet with a rich, buttery flavor and a soft texture except where it is studded with beans that add a grainier feel. The package calls it "milk taste" but I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean. It doesn't taste like milk so much as the aforementioned cookie dough with bits of adzuki bean to spice it up.

I found these for 98 yen (about $1.24) at Inageya supermarket and since buying the first one, I have purchased three more. The company that makes them makes a variety of bean-based sweets including a delicious super moist sweet potato version which I have also eaten three of. This is the sort of thing I'm going to seriously and truly miss when I go back home as I'm sure they will be a rare find with their short shelf life. Right now, my consumption of them is limited by the desire not to get fat on moist tasty bean cakes. Though these may seem healthy, they pack a big punch calorie-wise at 260 calories each and are full of fat and sugar. I'm not fooling myself that this is much better than eating a candy bar or big cookie. Still, I consider it well worth the investment in dietary fats and sugar, but I have to buy one at a time or risk eating myself sick.

Ogura (red bean) Pretz

Awhile back, I reviewed the gyoza (potsticker) Pretz and said I would also be reviewing this red bean variety. Shortly after that review, I put the second box of Pretz into a basket on top of my refrigerator (in which snacks wait for sampling) and forgot about it. Fortunately, these are still on sale so this review hasn't lapsed into irrelevance.

You can find these in most snack shops and convenience stores, but I got this at a discount snack shop in Koenji called  Okashi no Marche. They cost 99 yen ($1.14). Each box has two 27.5 gram (about 1 oz.) foil packets of pretzels and there are 135 calories. This is pretty average for this portion of pretzels. The ingredients list is as expected (flour, margarine, etc.), excepted that it includes adzuki powder.

Yes, this is the same picture from my other review. The pretzels look exactly the same. Only the powder flavoring is different.

It's rather a shame that I waited so long because these are really good. I've never had a sweet pretzel that really wowed me that wasn't coated in some form of chocolate, but this came about as close as a pretzel can to doing so. The red bean flavor isn't as "beany" as these things can be. It's more of an essential essence with the beaniness removed. They're lightly sweetened, but not so faintly that you can't detect the sweetness.

I would recommend these for red bean sweet novices. They introduce you to the flavor without any of the elements which tend to put people off of them. I really liked them, but those who really, really love adzuki and its textural elements may find it too limited an emulation of the red bean experience. I'll definitely buy them again though.

Pepsi Azuki

Of all of the strange drinks I've tried, this one presented me with the greatest mystery. Like the Ginger Ale Lemon KitKat, this product represents a flavor that you can't imagine being incorporated into this particular type of product.

I rarely sniff something and think "smells like barf". Pepsi Azuki smells like someone threw up their bean cake. This was not a promising start. It does smell like azuki that has gone off a bit though, so I guess that is something. This was the weirdest color of Pepsi that I've ever seen. My guess is that it was tinted this color to resemble red beans. In the right light, it's a deep pink. In somewhat darker light, it's a ruddy red. The bottle is 207 calories for 490 ml. and I picked it up at Family Mart for 147 yen ($1.62).

The taste isn't nearly as bad as the smell lead me to believe it might be. It mainly tastes like jasmine with a red bean chaser. There's nothing in it which says "Pepsi" to me though. The jasmine flavor is slightly flowery, but dry so that it doesn't seem too perfumey. The azuki bean part hits you at the end and the jasmine at the beginning. This works a bit better than the opposite might.

I wouldn't even ponder buying this again. It's not intolerable or anything, but it's pretty weird. The jasmine part is pleasant enough and makes me wish they'd make a jasmine Pepsi (if they're reading, I may be giving them ideas). If this was sugar-free, I'd finish the bottle, but I'm not spending 207 snack calories for the novelty of drinking the whole thing.

Adzuki KitKat

KitKats that are flavored with traditional Japanese tastes should hold the promise of an interesting and unique experience. The KitKat Adzuki flavor box encourages this idea. It tells you that this "can be used as a Japanese snack" and it has a fan design and fancy Japanese writing. The packaging is whacking you over the head with the very Japanese-ness of this flavor.

With the aforementioned notion in mind, I picked up the adzuki (or azuki, depending on whose spelling you take as valid) variety at the local 99 yen shop. Upon opening the bar, I was immediately disappointed to see that it was a white chocolate bar studded with little brown spots.


The reason this is disappointing is that the beans being sprinkled throughout the white chocolate means that the flavor is almost certainly going to be buried deep in sweet white chocolate. I gave the bar a few good sniffs and strained my nostrils to detect any whiff of beany goodness (if nostrils can be strained). Remember receiving white chocolate rabbits in your Easter basket when you were a kid? Yeah, you remember because they were the ones your mother bought to add an aesthetically pleasing look to the basket by mixing the rabbit colors. You were disappointed to see the white ones. This bar smells like those rabbits, like bland white chocolate. It smells like disappointment.

My first bite revealed a massively sweet flavor with only the barest bit of adzuki flavor at the tail end. I was hoping that once my tongue recovered from the initial sugar shock that I'd be able to taste more of the adzuki. It's also sometimes the case that you can get the effect of layering a subtle flavor through continued consumption. Sometimes your tongue becomes more attuned to such flavors as you eat more. In this case, I found that I actually tasted less adzuki as I continued to eat. My tongue grew immune to what few notes of bean there were.

Two fingers and 114 calories later, I remained disappointed and my throat was burning from the sweetness. A look at the ingredients reveals that adzuki is pretty far down the line after several types of sugar. American candy is often cited for being too incredibly sweet, but the truth is that Japanese candy can be just as bad, or worse, than some American candy. This adzuki bar certainly proves that.

Dainagon Castella Cakes

When I review a brand or company for the first time, I like to include a little background information. This requires some research in Japanese and English, but I believe it's worth it to develop a deeper understanding of the product and to tell the reader something other than the nuts and bolts of how good or bad the food is.

With this particular brand name, I couldn't find out much. In fact, the only "corporate" web page I could find included only an address, telephone number, basic sales data, and number of employees. The product itself is featured as part of a site called "Omiyage Park" that showcases a variety of souvenirs. "Omiyage" is the Japanese word for souvenir gifts. To me, that suggests that the brand name is relatively new since most companies with a long history in a particular business go out of their way to showcase that fact. In Japan, a company with a long history generally breeds trust in the brand name.

This box contained 6 small cakes which are similar to castella. Castella is an immensely popular type of sponge cake in Japan which originated with the Portuguese hundreds of years ago. That's the reason the name sounds very un-Japanese. You can get castella anywhere including convenience stores. The quality is highly variable. Most of it is rather tacky to the touch, stickily sweet, and a bit dry and course. It comes in a lot of flavor varities though the most common is a plain type.

These particular cakes were given to my husband as a gift. There are 3 green tea and 3 red bean (adzuki) varieties. Each cake is individually-wrapped and quite small. They are not the sort of thing we would buy for ourselves since he actively dislikes green tea sweets and I'm indifferent to unattracted to them. My tolerance of green tea items depends greatly on the intensity of tea flavor. While I don't mind red beans, I don't crave them either. To me, they carry the texture of kidney beans, though not the taste.

I first sampled the adzuki bean cake and actually liked it quite a lot. It's studded with a lot of beans, but not so many as to weigh the cake down. The cake is moist and lightly sweet. When you smell it, it smells ever so slightly "beany". It's pleasant-tasting and the adzuki flavor is present, but not overwhelmingly strong.

The green tea cakes are a whole other beast. They smell intensely of green tea and are soft but slightly dry. They are studded with little green pea-type beans which may have been steeped in tea flavor. On the first bite, you are smashed over the head with a hard hit of tea at the start which mellows with initial bites. It's less sweet than the adzuki flavor cake, though only by the slimmest of margins.

These cakes were very, very fresh when the box was first opened, but they noticeably lose quality after a day or two. The web site that sells these encourages you to eat them quickly after opening and I'm guessing this is why. Note that the pictures of these cakes on the web site are almost certainly plastic food versions and not the real cake. Nutrition information is absent as it is for most snacks expressly for sale as souvenirs so I have no information regarding calories. The ingredients are mostly standard cake fare (flour, sugar, eggs) along with green tea and adzuki beans.

I'd never buy these for myself, but I certainly wouldn't mind receiving a box with only the adzuki flavor again. They are a nice change of pace and satisfy a craving for a bit of cake. The green tea ones are just too strong for me, but I'm guessing they'd be great for someone who doesn't mind feeling like they're licking some green tea powder. As it is, I'm going to give the two remaining green tea cakes away to one of my students who loves green tea sweets and will likely appreciate them more than me.