Fujiya Milky Big Ball Corn Potage Candy

Friends, Romans, countrymen, and anyone from any country other than Italy or America who reads my blog, I am here today to talk about corn. Yes, I have spoken many times about how corn is the king of all grains and I will speak of it again as long as you don't start posting comments about how you're sick of me talking about corn and will quit reading if I keep up this nonsense.

One of the many things I learned from life in Japan (and I've learned so much, including the fact that mayonnaise is considered its own food group with a minimum daily allowance in said country) was that we view corn in far too limited a fashion in the U.S. Sure, we have cornmeal, muffins, cakes, etc., but we have no yet released a candy that is corn flavored. The furthest that we are willing to go is to cram cornflakes in our sweets... and, for some reason, the sushi at Safeway supermarket also has cornflakes but that's a life mystery for another time to explore. Today, we're talking about the under-utilization of corn.

When I saw this corn candy at Nijiya market for a mere $2.19 (I'm sure it sells for about half that in Japan, but, imports, go figure), I knew that I would have to buy it because this was the sort of "only in Japan" thing that people need to be aware of. Sure, they think "only in Japan" applies to men cuddling pillows shaped like women's laps and muttering "moe" under their breath in contentment or that people are eating burgers made from the ground flesh of beef that drank nothing but beer and had their torsos massaged daily by cherubic children in school uniforms.

The real "only in Japan" is far more mundane than that, at least in my opinion. It's the funk that isn't funky enough for the blogs to cover, and it includes (but is certainly not limited to) how they more fully embrace corn. Sure, we know they put it on their pizza and sell it with their pizza (so that you can put mayo on it and eat it as your "vegetable" side dish), but they also drink it in soup for breakfast and, they put it in their candy. They put it in 22-calorie morsels of taffy-like candy that are marketed as "big balls".

I opened a wrapper and gave the candy a sniff. It doesn't smell like anything. When you put it in your mouth, it is a little on the hard side and you have to warm it up and chew it to release the flavor. As it softens into a chewing gum-like taffy, it starts to melt in your mouth and release strong sweet-corn flavor which is amplified by the corn syrup (which is the first ingredient). It is also infused with richness and even more sweetness from sweetened condensed milk. In the end, it is potently sweet and has strong corn flavor. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but this is a pretty intense flavor experience both on the sweetness and corn front.

I liked this quite a lot, to be honest. I love corn flavored things and corn potage soup in particular. Lately, I've also taken to making polenta and eating it with pancake syrup and butter (as well as in savory preparations). When I make corn tea, I even sweeten it to bring out an essence which is similar to this (and corn tea is naturally sweet). Corn and sugar are in a good relationship as far as I'm concerned.

That being said, I would not say this is for everyone. For some people, corn is associated with more savory options and they think of it as something slathered with butter and sprinkled with salt - either at a movie theater or a backyard barbecue. Depending on your tastes, this could be manna from heaven or a horrendous blob of sugary awfulness. All I can say is that, this is what "candy corn" should be rather than the horrible stuff we see every Halloween. If candy corn tasted like this corn candy, (at least some) people might actually be happy to eat it.

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.

Bourbon Marron Blanchul

I've been reading a book about the nature of good and evil, and, no, I'm not going to talk about how food is "good" or "bad" based on its nutritional content because we all know that isn't going to have a happy ending on this blog. The book talks about a large number of studies conducted on babies in order to determine if we are born with our sense of morality or if we learn it. The jury will be forever out, but early results indicate we are not born as tabula rasa (blank slates), but come with some basic sensibilities or inclinations.

The reason I mention this book is that the studies are discussed in terms of how valid what they are measuring is based on how the study is designed. For example, to see if babies like "good" or "bad" things, an animation using colored shapes (red square, blue triangle, yellow circle) was used in which on shape either helped or hindered another while it traveled up a hill. The writer labors to let the reader know that the colors and shapes were varied in order to be certain that the babies didn't like a certain color or shape, but rather liked the shape that pushed the other up a hill and disliked the one that blocked it.

How you look at something matters as much, if not more, than what something actually is. Truth is not nearly as objective as people believe it is because there is always a perspective that may be as valid as what you see as an absolute fact. The people who designed the original experiments probably just thought shapes were enough to take away any bias on the part of babies while allowing for discriminating features, but then others came along and said they saw the baby's preferences differently. The experiments had to be refined to eliminate all possible interpretations other than the one which said babies like helping things more than harming things.

The interesting thing about studies like this and analyses is that how something is conceptualized is highly variable. In Japan, I often had this difficulty with students who tried to translate concepts from their language to ours. Some of my students called sembei a "cracker" and some called it a "cookie". Since sembei are both sweet and savory, hard and dense, and light and airy, it is difficult to say any particular translation is correct. The Japanese conceptualize sembei as these crispy things made of rice and don't need to break them down into sub-categories. However, Western folks don't tend to see "crackers" as something sweet and I wonder if it is impossible for someone to be given a frosted sembei and think it was some bizarre Japanese "cookie" rather than a "cracker".

The reason this thought came to mind was that I was looking for today's item on Bourbon's web site so that I could get more information about it. It turned out that locating it was quite a byzantine task. Is it a cookie? Is it chocolate? Is it candy? Each is a thin, delicately crispy plank with a large amount of chestnut chocolate filling between. The box calls it a "blanchul", which sounds French, but I couldn't find anything that explained what that might be. In fact, searches just turned up more varieties of "blanchul" that are sold by Bourbon.

At any rate, I don't know how Bourbon sees these, but I checked "biscuits", "chocolate", "small box biscuits", "chocolate snack", and "snacks" (long shot as this is usually a catch-all for salty things) and I could not locate the damn things. What is it that Bourbon sees these as? Well, it turns out that they see them as a limited edition release that came out at the end of August that no longer warrants addition on their web site... so much for perspectives on the truth and other lofty thoughts that don't belong in a snack blog anyway.

Getting to the business at hand, which does belong on a snack blog, these are excellent cookies. They are sweet, crispy, and have a taste which is reminiscent of caramel and coffee. The "coffee" aspect comes from the roasting of the chestnuts. The caramel probably has to do with warmed sugar and butter aspects. It doens't taste strongly of chestnut, but tastes quite good nonetheless. The box says that 10% is chestnut, which really isn't an enormous amount, but it all works nonetheless.

I loved these and felt that they were a perfect fusion of cookie and candy. They may be on the sweet side for some, but, to me, that just encourages portion control. Each cookie is only 22 calories and packs enough of a punch that you aren't going to want to gobble a bunch down at once. I don't know how much longer these will be on the market, though chestnut is an autumn/winter flavor so I'd wager they have another month or two. I found them at Nijiya for $2.19 (about 225 yen). In Japan, they're 130 yen ($1.34). They were well worth what I paid for them and I'd buy them again.

Glico Disaster Supply Marketing

Image courtesy of Glico.

Glico knows how to survive a disaster. If there's an earthquake, typhoon, or nuclear disaster, all you need to sustain you is several cans of their snacks and curry. In order to make sure that they stay intact, they offer them in vacuum packages and tins. This protects them from air and water and, according to Glico, makes them easier to carry.

As part of this promotion, they're emphasizing that their packets of shelf stable curry are tasty and have a good texture even if they aren't heated. They also mention that their candies will provide quick energy if you're on the run from falling objects and can't get food. The Glico biscuits are easy to eat for the whole family from children to grannies.

Personally, I'm a bit suspicious about the nutrition you'll get from candy, cookies, and curry packets. They assume, I guess, that you're going to also have shelf-stable rice packets or that you'll pour your curry on your cookies or something. At any rate, with the earthquake situation in Japan, it's a good idea to keep food supplies on hand, but I'm not sure this is the mix you're going to want to invest in. 

Tirol Premium Choco Banana

I thought that my days of reviewing Tirol chocolates were over when my airplane left Narita airport on March 29, 2012. I figured that, of all of the things which might be imported, these tiny little squares of 20 yen (26 cents) chocolate would not make the cut. This is because they melt easily, have a low profit margin, and they are not famous among foreigners so people wouldn't know what to make of them when they saw them in stores, unlike KitKats.

The truth is that finding KitKats hasn't exactly been easy in America either, despite the relatively high level of interest in exotic Japanese KitKat flavors. Even places that carry a lot of imported Japanese items tend to focus on sembei (rice crackers), Pocky, and various cooking ingredients rather than on candy bars. I did, however, finally make my way to a major chain of Japanese markets and discovered not only overpriced Japanese KitKats ($7 for a bag of minis), but also this flavor of Tirol candy. Of course, these cost 49 cents and were nearly double their Japan price, but I wasn't going to quibble when I wasn't the one who had to fly over  to Japan and keep the box on my lap on the way home. Also, I'm good with making an investment of about 50 cents to sample something and not so happy about $7 (548 yen, not too different from the retail price of a bag of them in Japan, but no one pays the retail price) on a KitKat flavor that is just a small step removed from what I've tried before. Incidentally, the KitKat flavors on offer were green tea, vanilla ice cream and raspberry, all of which I've had in other iterations before.

This is quite a sophisticated little piece of candy for something you buy in a plastic and foil wrapper in a market. I was impressed that it had four different layers. The outside is a very thin shell of white chocolate. Under the top surface is chocolate syrup with a small amount of banana goop under it. The bottom is a semi-sweet chocolate and the center is a marshmallow. The flavor depth on this is quite surprising. You get banana, which tastes good and as close to "real" as I've had in a such a sweet and a deep semi-sweet chocolate (very reminiscent of Hershey's syrup) which is properly balanced. This actually tastes like a real chocolate banana, but it has the added pleasures of the texture and compactness of chocolate.

Each candy is 49 calories for about a 1" (2.54 cm.) square and is well worth the sugar investment if you're a fan of chocolate-covered bananas. I found these at Nijiya Market in Mountain View, CA. Nijiya has shops in many cities in California as well as one in New York and a few in Hawaii. The package design led me to believe that it was a summer release (the fans) and Tirol's web site lists this as a current variety that one can purchase in convenience stores in Japan. Unfortunately, I know of no mail order options for this or any other Tirol candy. Nijiya has an online shop, but snacks don't tend to be listed there.

This was much more tasty than I expected, particularly since I tend to be unimpressed by banana candy. I love bananas, but find that infusing it into candy tends to be nasty. This worked and I'd definitely buy it again.

Incidentally, if you are interested in some cute wallpapers, you can download them from Tirol's web site here.

Oshidori Milk "Cake"

When is a cake not a cake? Well, it's not a cake when it's a slab of hardened condensed milk. I have been intrigued by this product for quite some time. It has been in what I call the "Granny's snacks" section of Peacock Supermarket for over a year. I don't believe this is actually a snack for oldsters though. In fact, I think it is specifically designed for children but is in the section with old-fashioned treats.

For those who don't remember, "Granny's snacks" are what I call groups of unglamorous looking treats which are made by smaller companies. I call them that because they are the types of things which I think grandparents keep shoved in the back of a cabinet for months and dole out when grandchildren clamor for treats. I don't know that that is what happens when these are purchased. I just know that they are exiled to a different snack area than the more glamorous chocolates, Pocky, gum, and other items made by bit ticket companies like Lotte, Meiji, and Morinaga.

A package of 10 sticks of this milk candy cost 210 yen ($2.30). Each stick is 8 cm x 2 cm x. 4 cm (3.1" x .8" x .15") in size, and is 25 calories. They are made by a company called Takahata, which has a lot of the common ecological claptrap that many companies like to mention as part of their PR. The company makes handmade cheeses as well as a variety of these milk candies. I've only ever seen this "milk" variety, but they also have other types like chocolate, strawberry, yogurt and green tea.

I have had enough experience with "milk" flavored foods in Japan to know that these were going to taste like condensed milk. The point that I was most interested in understanding was the texture and the sweetness. The first ingredient is milk, followed by sugar. These are fortified with Vitamin E and the packaging advertises the fact that these are rich in Calcium. Each stick boasts 31 mg. of Calcium. To give you some perspective on the relative value of this food, I can tell you that an average adult needs 1000 mg. a day. Eating one of these is a drop in the bucket.

These sticks are hard, even though they look like they might be brittle. Breaking one in half with your hands isn't trivial, and biting into one feels a little like trying to shatter a hard candy with your teeth. I thought perhaps that one was supposed to suck on one like a hard candy, but that didn't seem to work. Not only don't they melt in your mouth very well, but they are the wrong shape. Maybe they're designed for young children to slobber over for a long period of time and take a long time to eat. The way in which they are sold doesn't seem to indicate that though. The multi-packs on the web site for this product look like souvenir packs for adults.

I actually liked these, despite the fact that I'm not over the moon about condensed milk flavor. They were lightly sweet and the flavor seemed relatively mild compared to other "milk" treats. I liked the texture and how they broke up when I bit into them, though frankly I was a little worried about what they'd do to my teeth. I can't recommend these for everyone. I think they're an acquired taste, but if you like condensed milk, they're definitely worth a sampling.

Daiiti Seika Goma (Sesame) Crunch Candy

One of my labels for posts is the category "grandma's snacks". This is the sort of old-fashioned stuff that I believe is marketed toward the older generation and reviewing such items is always a pain in the ass. The main reason for this is that it requires harder research to find the company that made the product, and often a much harder time reading the names of the companies. You can read Japanese characters in different ways such that even Japanese people read names incorrectly. For instance, I have a student name "Satomi" but her name can be read as "Rimi". In fact, when she was referred to me, the referral agency tole me her name was "Rimi" (and they're Japanese). You know that a language is confusing when even its native speakers can't read the names correctly.

With a little help from my husband (who is pretty good at kanji), I learned that this is made by a company named Daichi Seika, though they romanize the characters as Daiiti on their web site. They make a variety of nut brittle types of candies, but mainly focus on peanuts and sesame seeds. Their product line is limited and not incredibly glamorous, as is often the case with grandma's snacks types of treats.


I picked up this bag of very tiny sesame seed bars (5 cm x 2 cm x .5 cm/2 in. x .8 in. x .2 in.) at a local discount snack shop. It was about 120 yen ($1.34) and there are 24 individually wrapped pieces in the bag. Each candy is 22 calories if my math is correct. The first ingredient is sesame seeds and the second is granulated sugar followed by maltose and peanuts. This covers pretty much all of the flavor in these minuscule bits of sesame brittle.

The first taste is of the sesame and familiar sugary flavor. The sugar aspect is just like what I grew up with eating cheap nut brittle. That is, it has no toffee elements to it because there seems to be no butter. That doesn't mean it's bad at all. On the contrary, the sesame seed flavor is so perfect and rich that I think it's better that the sweetness be very simple. There are also tiny bits of peanut in the little slabs which come out when you come across one. Strangely, these smell just like peanuts despite the small amount of them in the bars.

I would absolutely buy these again. They are well-made, fresh, and have a great taste. I also think they'd make a pretty good souvenir for fussier eaters back home, particularly those who want something a little off the beaten path (sesame brittle instead of peanut). The only issue I have with these is that they are extremely hard to limit your intake of. They really are that good and the tiny size can deceive you into thinking eating a lot at once is OK, but those calories start to add up fast.

Sugarhouse Brown Sugar Candy

When I was a kid and wanted something sweet, I would sometimes nibble just a little brown sugar from a teaspoon. I loved the flavor, but you could so quickly get too much both from the intense sweetness and the heavy molasses flavor. Like salt, sugar is one of those things that, when used in the right amount, is a thing of great beauty, but too much is a disaster. I wish I could say that the Sugarhouse brown sugar candy was a thing of beauty, but it's definitely more of a train wreck.


When I bought this at an upscale market called "Queen's Isetan" for about 140 yen (about $1.45), I was lured by the resemblance to fudge that the picture on the front had. You'd think that this is a mistake that I'd stop making after so many years in Japan. Things here are not what they resemble back home. The bottom line is that this is little more than hydrated, formed blocks of brown sugar. The taste is just like those teaspoons of brown sugar I'd nibble at as a child. It's intensely sweet and overbearing, and can only appeal to people who like to eat sugar straight from the bag. If that sort of thing appeals to you, you can stick this packet in your pocket (which is one of its selling points) and put away 362 calories of brown sugar nastiness.

I tried to do some research on the company that made this, Sugarhouse, but they are too small-time to even have their own web site. The only thing I could find were a lot of references to the location of the company through various mapping web sites. I'm not sure what else they make besides this candy, but I hope they've got something else going for them because I can't imagine this is going to be a success for them.

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.

Sweet Potato Candy (Karaimo)

One of the reasons I started this blog was to compel myself to try new things in Japan. I've lived here a long time, and I believe it's easy to fall into a rut and just forget to bother looking around and trying other things. Another was to develop a better understanding of various Japanese foods, their manufacturers, and the nutritional content of those foods. In that spirit, I've been perusing some parts of the food aisles I normally skip over. One of the places I never paid much attention to was the area containing what I would loosely call the "Grandma's snacks."

These snacks are located in a different area from the candy, cookie and chips that are the most popular and well known. The snacks sold there are in packages with less showy designs and the manufacturers are not well-known. Most of them have no English written on them at all, unlike splashy items like "Pocky" and "Crunky" that are dominated by their big, bold, roman-lettered names. Most of these things are less sweet and supposedly carry a better nutritional profile. They're also rarely individually wrapped.

The main problem with this new approach and blogging about what I find is that it's much more difficult to research such snacks as they aren't high profile. In fact, when I tried to research the sweet potato candy I sampled for this post, I couldn't find much about the sweet or the company that makes them. The ony thing I can say is that several manufacturers make the same candy and they all look just like the one I bought with slightly different packages.

From what little I could find out about these candies, they are considered to be traditional and something which is appropriate for families. This may seem like a pretty bland thing to say, and frankly it is. Most Japanese candy has fluffy, bland marketing behind it, but it doesn't always specifically say it's family-oriented. Many big name commercial sweets are purchased by young adults. There's a whole other range of snacks for kids which have a different flavors, sizes and packaging. The snacks marketed at adults tend to come individually wrapped so they can be eaten slowly and shared with coworkers. Even hard candy is individually wrapped in many cases so sharing is easy and careless re-wrapping once the bag is open won't result in the food going stale or sticky. These types of "Grandma's snacks" are clearly made to be opened, sampled, and carefully resealed for future consumption. I'm wondering if some Japanese old folks keep these types of things around the way my grandmothers used to keep around ribbon candy.

These candies look like a conventional hard candy, but are dull and ever so slightly soft if you squeeze them very hard. They are covered in a fine powder which is not sweet and has the occasional black spec. One of the manufacturers of these types of candies (though not my bag's maker) stated on its web site that these specs are not to be mistaken as dirt or unwanted foreign objects. They are byproducts of the roasting process used to make the candy. I'm guessing the outside powder is some kind of rice, wheat or potato flour which is meant to keep the candies from sticking to each other.

When you open the bag, there is a unusual "spiciness" which you can smell if you sniff very hard. It smells both like and unlike sweet potatoes. I'm guessing that processing them alters the usual scent of Japanese sweet potatoes. The ingredients for this candy are sweet potato syrup , malt syrup, brown sugar, and wheat flour. Though they are not super smooth, they don't feel rough in your mouth, though they are too hard to bite into. You have to suck on them for awhile and they start to soften up and become sticky. Eventually, they develop a caramel or taffy consistency as they are warmed and moistened in your mouth. As they soften, you will naturally start to chew on them and they do stick to your teeth to some extent.

The taste is subtle both in terms of sweetness and sweet potato flavor. They're pleasant, but a little hard to eat and not the sort of thing you're going to go crazy for. I think they're not a bad thing to have lying around to sample once in awhile and they aren't incredibly caloric. The entire bag is 130 grams (4.5 oz.) and contains about 30-35 candies. I didn't count so I can't give an exact number, but I think each candy probably has about 20 calories. Given that they take awhile to eat, you may find that you can satisfy your sweet tooth without scarfing down a lot of calories. I just wish the sweet potato aspect of them was a bit more intense.

Yuzu KitKat Mini

Yuzu is a citrus fruit originally grown in China which is often used like lemons in Japanese cuisine. That is, people don't eat the actual fruit, but they use the juice or rind to season various sauces and dishes. It's an interesting and obvious choice as a KitKat flavor, much as chocolate and orange or lemon are at times combined in sweets in the West.


Since various types of fruit have relatively singular flavors, it is difficult to describe the taste of yuzu to those who have never sampled it, but it comes closest to a cross between a grapefruit and a mandarin orange. It is pleasantly fragrant and you can smell it the minute you open the package of the candy bar. Those who have never sampled yuzu may feel it smells a lot like an orange chocolate bar, though something seems a little different. The yuzu KitKat tastes like orange chocolate at first and has a slightly bitter finish. The bitter aspect takes a little while to show up and may not be apparent to someone who does not have a particularly acute sense of taste or who only takes one bite.

I really liked this, as did my husband who is not a fan of bitter flavors. If you like orange chocolate, you will probably embrace this as a good change of pace and an intriguing flavor. This is a limited edition, and as far as I know can only be purchased in mini size. My husband picked these up in a convenience store in Tokyo for about 40 yen (38 cents). Get some while you can.

Another review of this is at Candy Blog and Sweet Pursuit.

Yuraku Caramel Almond Latte Chocolate Bar

When I saw this bar, I thought that someone was trying way too hard to throw the candy equivalent of the kitchen sink into one itty bitty bar. There are so many parts to the name of the bar that they can't simply write it across the package. They have to stack "caramel" on top of "amond" which is on top of "choco bar" and "latte". There's even more that doesn't fit into the name. There are also wheat puffs in it.


This is another of the candy options available in some stores for only 27 yen (25 cents) that you can pick up with kid's snacks. It's a little less than half the size of most bars and is made by a company named Yuraku (ユラク). It makes a variety of sweets including cookies, candy bars, chocolates and souvenir sweets. Most of its products are pretty low rent and either blandly or badly packaged. The company's "principle" is "contributing to society through making candy." That's some lofty goal. I wonder if one tiny little bar is going to live up to that.


The bar's smell is so mixed that it's hard to pin it down. The scent is like an elixir of malt, cereal, coffee, and chocolate. The "cereal" smell comes from the wheat puffs which are present in abundance. The large white bits in the detailed picture above are these puffs and the first bite of the bar strongly reveals the cereal flavor. In fact, the puffs portion tastes exactly like the Popeye wheat puff cereal my parents used to buy for me when I was a kid. Subsequent bites bring about a stronger sense of all of the flavors. All of them, the caramel, coffee, chocolate, almonds and wheat puffs are present in an extremely tasty mishmash of flavors. The bar is crunchy, but easy to bite into and chew.

The ingredients list for this bar is huge, but the whole bar contains a good balance of sweetness and complex flavors. It's no premium bar by any stretch of the imagination, but it's very good, particularly for 90 calories and for such a low price. It's definitely something I'd have again. The lesson learned from this experience is not to conclude that something is going to be bad because it's cheap and from a company which isn't very well known. This is a tasty little bar.

Caramel Latte Crunky

Before Nestlé started releasing hundreds of varieties of KitKats in Japan (yes, there was a time when that wasn't the case), Crunky was the candy du jour for most foreign folks. How can you go wrong with a bar which resembles a Nestlé's Crunch and has a funny name? Of course, the venerable Crunky is not this version of Crunky. The old favorite is plain chocolate with crispy malt puffs. That bar, incidentally, was changed some time in the past year. They increased the number of malt puffs such that the bar has become more puff than chocolate. It has a much heavier "cereal" flavor than it used to have.


This variation on the Crunky keeps the explosion of malt puffs, but mixes them with white chocolate. If you're hoping that it's lower calorie because of the cereal aspect, you're in for some bad luck. It's 269 calories for the entire 48 gram (1.7 oz.) bar. When you give it a sniff, you smell that telltale sweetness of white chocolate with undertones of caramel and malt. The malted puffs are not excessively airy so the bar is dense, but crunchy and easy to bite into. It is called caramel latte, but I didn't detect any sort of coffee flavor and there is no coffee in the ingredients list. The caramel part was subdued and that was okay with me because a weak caramel flavor is preferable to strong, fake caramel flavors.

This is a pretty nice bar, but the explosion of malt puffs carries it close to the edge of being a cereal bar. That doesn't bother me at all. In fact, in the milk chocolate Crunky, I like it, but I'm not a strong fan of caramel or white chocolate so this is one of those things I'd nibble at very slowly and not buy again. For those who like caramel, this might be the bee's knees, but only if they aren't looking for something super rich and decadent.

KitKat Mini Caramel Purin Flavor

The Japanese don't celebrate Halloween, but they have all the trappings of wanting to do so. Scary television programs are scheduled in line with the holiday. Some shops sell decorations and many of them sell candy as if kids were going to be going door to door begging for sugary niblets. The bag of mini KitKats pictured above has all the earmarks of being the sort of candy you'd buy and pass out when kids in costumes ring your doorbell. However, no kids are going to go out and mooch for candy in Tokyo on October 31. It simply isn't the sort of thing the Japanese would do.

The bag design for these Kitkats has ghosts, witches hats, stars, bats, and a pumpkin on it and is in traditional Halloween orange. The individually wrapped small bars inside also have a similar theme. When you open the bag, you smell artificial caramel immediately. This was a bad sign in my opinion. If the sealed packets can't contain the smell, how strong must it be?


After opening a packet, I was heartened to see that they are covered in milk chocolate rather than white chocolate. That means that the coating probably is just regular milk chocolate and not infused with the artificial caramel purin flavor. Despite the intense smell, the bars themselves have a good balance of smokey caramel purin flavor and chocolate. Purin, by the way, is really just custard with a burnt caramel sauce on top of it (like flan or créme caramel). This bars taste exactly like one of those custards covered in milk chocolate and the taste is quite enjoyable. I'm guessing they succeeded because the flavoring is kept in the cream between the wafers where it belongs rather than mixed in with the chocolate.

One side note about the mini bars is that they seem to melt quickly when you hold them. I'm not sure why the melting point of these should be so low, but I'd recommend refrigerating them. Room temperature bars will melt on your fingers and make a mess.


There are about 14 or so little individually wrapped bars in one bag. The packets all have different messages on them. One of them said, 'Halloween is the time when children's dreams come true.' I'm guessing a lot of Japanese kids dream of not learning thousands of Chinese characters or cramming for brutal rounds of entrance tests more than candy, but I'm thinking such dreams are unlikely to be fulfilled.

I don't believe you can buy this flavor in a "single serving" bar size, but it could simply be that they are not sold in that form in my area. Each bar is about half the length and about the same width as a conventional Japanese KitKat bar. There are 66 calories in one mini bar. If you'd like just a little something sweet, they're just the right size.

While I wouldn't rate these higher than a classic KitKat, they are definitely one of the better flavored variations that I've encountered lately. If you want a change of pace, or want something you can share around the office, these would be a good choice.

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Here are other reviews of this bar which you may enjoy:
badmoodguy in paradise: Nihonjin Nibbles: Halloween KitKat and Jen's KitKat Blog.

The Japanese Snack Food Review

Morinaga Black Sugar Milk Caramels

The packaging on a lot of Japanese sweets is pretty clear cut and designed to give you a good idea of what is inside. Most of it is also modern-looking. Morinaga, which has been in business since 1899, has quite a few products with rather old-fashioned packaging. One of my former students was married to a man who worked at Morinaga and she told me that the company was deeply steeped in old-style thinking and culture and reluctant to change their ways.

If you look at the box for these caramels, you can see a lot of their old-fashioned design on them. The same goes for their plain chocolate bars which come in a plain brown wrapper with an ornate frame design around the name of the company. The company's old-style logo (an angel holding an "M" can be seen in a square at the top of the box). There is a more modern-looking logo on other products, but its line of caramels, retains the old-fashioned design. This is probably because caramels were the first confection the company made and can be considered a signature product. They may also not appeal to young folks so much as nostalgic older people. I've noticed that the caramels are much harder to find than other Morinaga sweets.

At the moment, there are three types of these caramels on the market: the original milk caramel, black sugar and adzuki. I've never seen the red adzuki flavor box in any store, and I can only locate the black sugar ones in one of the 4 markets in my immediate area. "Black sugar" is what Western folks call "brown sugar", though it seems more heavily influenced by molasses than the "brown sugar" you buy in bags (to cook with) in Japanese markets. In fact, brown sugar sold for baking and whatnot is very light and only a stone's throw from white sugar in taste.

The black sugar sweets you can buy, on the other hand, are very richly flavored. These caramels are no exception. When you unwrap the foil, there's a smooth bit of caramel which is only the tiniest bit sticky to the touch so your fingers don't get messy. It smells sweet, milky and somewhat of honey. In fact, the American candy that it very much reminds me of is "Bit O' Honey."

Though the blocks are firms, they quickly soften up once you put them in your mouth and start to chew. They're also rather nice to just allow to melt a bit by sucking on them like a piece of hard candy. While it is sticky like most caramel, it doesn't stick terribly to your teeth. I'm not sure how Morinaga manages this feat, but it's appreciated. The caramel is rich and floods your mouth with a sweet, buttery, brown sugary flavor. It's delicious.

The ingredients include sugar water, brown sugar (60% grown in Hokkaido), milk with added sugar, sugar, vegetable oil, rice flour, salt, sorbitol, caramel coloring, and flavoring. As you might expect, you're essentially getting a whole lot of sugar in these. The size of the caramels is rather small which makes them much easier to chew as well as provides good portion control. There are 12 candies per box and a box costs about 130 yen ($1.24). The whole box is 245 calories so they weigh in at 20 calories apiece.

Given that these are both traditional and tasty, they are a great item to sample if you have a chance. I'm guessing they'd also be the ideal thing to just toss in a bag and keep around for awhile for those times when you'd like a little sugary pick-me-up.

Puré Blueberry Gummy

As a kid, I don't recall ever eating a gummy bear or any of the other popular forms of gummy. In fact, the only gummy I recall were fish that could be bought as penny candy back when such a thing existed. To be fair about my age, I'm not that old. Penny candy died out before I was 10 years old and it was never really good penny candy. You could get one gummy fish for a penny or a really tiny lame gumball, but you couldn't get a Reese's miniature for anything less than a nickel.

Because I never craved gummy (or gummi, if you like) and I value my teeth too much to eat a lot of sugary candy, I rarely try such things, but the idea of something fruity caught my fancy today at the store and I found this little 46 gram (1.6 oz) bag of sweets. These candies are made by Kanro which has the tagline, "a fairytale in your mouth." I'm not sure if that's supposed to be enchanting or scary. I guess it depends on which fairytale it is. If it's the three little pigs, I'm guessing we're talking mouthwatering pork products. If it's Snow White, it could be dwarven ale (good) or poison apples (bad). I shudder to think what I'd be tasting if it's Rumpelstiltskin.

Kanro makes a lot of candy made from sugar syrup rather than sweets like cookies, cakes, or chocolates. It's also a relatively small company compared to some of the bigger guns in the Japanese confectionery business. They make hard candies and throat lozenges as well as these gummies. In fact, I've been a regular consumer of one of their herbal sugar-free lozenges during most of my stay in Japan. These lozenges are quite effective, though they still seem to have the power to make my teeth ache despite being sugar-free. These Puré brand candies appear to be the only brand of gummy they make and come in four flavors, blueberry, pink grapefruit, lemon and grape.

The English on the bag says of Puré blueberry gummy says "blueberry juice that is sweet-sour tasting with the texture of fruit." This statement is half true. These candies are sweet and sour, but the only way they have the texture of fruit is if you're talking about something which resembles thick fruit leather. These gummi feel soft when you squeze them with your finger, but are tough to bite into. It's very hard to bite one in half and then you have to chew on it for a bit to warm it up so it softens. By the time that happens, it's all nearly dissolved in your mouth.


The candies are covered in citric acid powder, but it looks like good old coarse bits of sugar. In fact, one reason I bought these is that they resembled Sunkist fruit gems. Trust me when I say the similarities are all superficial. These are nothing like a fruit gem either in taste or in texture.

When you give the bag a sniff, it smells sour and not overly fruity or perfumey. It doesn't smell much like blueberries, but it does smell a bit like some sort of fruit. Each candy is vaguely heart-shaped. When you first bite into it, you're hit full on with the sour notes, but that gives way to an increasingly sweet taste and finally a pleasantly perfume-like berry taste. The experience is very nicely multi-layered and vastly different from my experience with generally sweet American "blueberry" candy. It's as if the candy changes as you masticate it. This keeps it from being too sweet or too sour.

The ingredients for this are relatively predictable. They include sugar, water, gelatin, concentrated blueberry juice, and pectin. Vitamin C and Calcium are also added in to enhance nutritional value. Each candy is 12.3 calories and has 2.88 mg of Vitamin C. Though you hardly would scarf down the whole small bag at one go, you could easily snack your way through one throughout a day if you kept them in your desk drawer.

I didn't expect to like these much, but I really did enjoy them. They are much closer to the experience of eating a real blueberry taste-wise than I expected. While I'm still not a fan of the rather tough texture, I'll probably buy these again some time when I'm in the mood for a fruit-flavored candy and feeling reckless about my teeth. I recommend giving them a try if your run across them.

Caramel Macchiato Kit-Kat

There are so many different Kit-Kats in Japan that I could probably populate this entire blog with reviews of nothing but various Kit-Kats. While I enjoy Kit-Kats, I'm not prepared to consume them quite so regularly. Also, to be quite honest, many of the flavored Kit-Kats in Japan are simply white chocolate ones with artificial or real flavors and colors stirred into the coating or filling.

My expectations of any particular short-lived flavor of Japanese Kit-Kat are usually pretty low because I know the roots of most of them. Many of them are too sweet and come too strong. I approached the caramel macchiato variety with this apprehension out in full force.

This Kit-Kat comes with a big advertisement on the cover for a McDonald's McFlurry. This is related to the fact that McDonald's is now featuring a caramel macchiato flavor McFlurry (and possibly to the fact that there is also a Kit-Kat flavored one). There may have been some sort of cross-advertising agreement between Nestlé and McDonald's or Nestlé is getting some sort of cash infusion from the golden arches, but the ways of business are a mystery to this simple food blogger. On the back of the box, there is a barcode which can be read by cell phones that can be read in and will allow you to get a coupon for a free McFlurry.

If you look at the upper left corner of the box, you'll see that the calorie count per serving is offered. This is a new trend among Japanese snack products. They put the calorie information both on the front and back so that consumers can consider whether the purchase is going to be worth the added calories. Note, however, that the 115 calories is for "1 package", not the entire box. Kit-kats in Japan are boxed with two packages of two fingers, not one bar of 4 fingers. The entire Kit-Kat is therefore 230 calories. You can also see that it says this caramel macchiato flavor is 1.0% coffee. I'm sure that'll make a huge difference in the flavor.


The bars are white chocolate with tan marbling. When you open the package, you are hit very clearly by an artificial burnt caramel scent. The information on the back says that the coating is caramel chocolate and the coffee component is in the cream between the wafer layers. This means the bar is sure to have a much heavier caramel flavor since the amount of coating greatly outweights the "cream" between the wafers. Also, even the scant cream is billed as having both caramel and espresso. My first bite confirmed this. I tasted the caramel on the super sweet coating and detected no coffee flavor at all. There was just the barest hint of a coffee-type bitter aftertaste on the tongue after the first bite, but it was very faint. The caramel taste is okay, but pretty obviously fake. Mainly, I get the sweetness.

The second bite revealed more coffee taste to me. My husband sampled it as well and he felt it carried a much stronger hit of coffee than I did right off the bat. In fact, his first response was that it had a strong coffee flavor. This could be related to the fact that he took bigger bites than I or that he feels less overwhelmed by caramel flavors. It could also be related to the fact that I sniffed the bar a few times first and smelling something often enhances taste.

I'm inclined to go with my husband's opinion on this more than mine as I am not a huge fan of caramel. He said that it carries more of a burnt caramel note rather than a buttery, pleasantly well-rounded caramel flavor and that he detects bitterness in it. The bar has a heavy artificial flavor and I asked if he'd buy this again and he said he would not. When queried about whether he'd even finish the other 2 fingers in the second package (we each had one finger from the first package to sample it), he said he'd only do so if he was seriously in the mood for something sweet and nothing else was around. Since he's a caramel fan, this isn't exactly a ringing endorsement of this bar.

This is also reviewed at Snack Love.