Riska Moist Chocolate Corn Snack

There are a lot of things about actually living in Japan rather than acquiring Japanese snacks through various channels in another country which make the experience unique. One is that I can never help people out when they ask me how to find something outside of Japan. I have many opportunities to feel profoundly useless to people on multiple occasions. Another is that I have tastes which are "normalized" to Japanese food such that they don't strike me as profoundly unique compared to other reviewers. I've noticed that people who infrequently review Japanese snacks tend to rate them more highly than I do. I think this is because they are comparing them to a different standard than me.

This notion comes to mind as I review this snack because I'm sure I'm experiencing it differently than those who haven't sampled most of Riska's line of products. If you've never tried their salty corn snacks, you won't realize that this is simply a chocolate-covered version of their basic corn puff recipe. In fact, it tastes almost exactly like their corn potage snack without the savory powdery coating. These are covered with a very satisfying layer of chocolate which is quite sweet, but still potent. Quite often, these cheap (80 grams for 100 yen/2.8 oz. for $1.30) snacks have very weak chocolate flavor, but these are quite good and flavorful. The initial taste is a burst of milk chocolate sweetness, but it is chased by the corn snack flavor which feels like it just doesn't belong. I'm not sure if I perceive them that way because I so strongly associate this taste with salty snacks or if they really aren't a great pairing. It feels like something like chocolate-covered Doritos, only not nearly as gross.

I'm rather torn about these. They're soft and crunchy at the same time and very satisfying on a textural level. They're sweet and strong, but the flavors don't quite match on my taste buds. Frankly, they strike me as  the sort of "junk food" that I could easily see eating the entire bag of and then being filled with regret that I spent 466 calories (about 12 calories per piece) on something that wasn't completely worth it. Then, I could see doing it again in the future. This is classic "good" bad food (including processed fat) which is easy to gobble down in great quantity, but if you pause and attempt to savor every bite, you'll probably not be nearly as happy with the experience. So, I'm offering this a conditional "happy" rating. If you're looking to pig out, these are great. If you're looking for a high quality experience to linger over, there's nothing to see here, move along.

Toy Story Kaputchyo Chocolate Caramel Corn Snack

Cereal isn't very popular in Japan as a breakfast food or snack. My husband and I once had a Japanese guest in America who we offered a plethora of cereal options to for breakfast, and he turned up his nose at all of them. He said that it wasn't enough food for him and that he needed eggs, soup, and rice for breakfast. Of course, this was a young, adult male, and he wasn't prepared to actually cook any of that for himself. He expected that it'd just magically appear in front of him, much as it did when he was at home and his mother just served up a fortifying meal for him.

However, cereal is popular in Japan as part of snacks, however. Mugi-choco, which resembles chocolate-covered puffed wheat cereal is available in a variety of sizes, price ranges, and quality variations. There is also the rice puff and corn puff snacks with a sugary coating that are especially popular during the doll's festival. Though they wouldn't recognize this fact, Japanese people would be very comfortable eating dry, sweet cereal out of the box like some Americans do if they realized that it is little different than what they're already doing.

This Toy Story chocolate-covered, caramel corn snack is little more than a corn puff cereal. In fact, with it's relatively light sweetness and somewhat strong caramel flavor, it'd probably be right at home in a bowl in front of a hyperactive child enjoying Saturday morning cartoons. That's not to say I'm encouraging anyone to buy it and douse it in milk. I'm guessing it hasn't been engineered not to go soggy in milk like real cereal is. The whole cup has 163 calories.

I got this as part of my New Year's fukubukuro, but this is part of Lotte's line of "kaputchyo" line which uses popular cartoon characters to market these types of sweets to children. They're all sold in 30-some gram (about 1 oz.) plastic cups with colorful designs and a "toy prize" (a sticker) inside. That brings the kid's cereal analogy closer to full circle. There are also chocolate and strawberry versions with Doraemon and Rilakkuma on their labels respectively.

If you're the type of person who likes to eat sugar cereal dry out of the box, this might float your boat, but I wasn't exactly doing cartwheels. I'm not a fan of cereal in particular anymore. This tasted decent enough, but it is a kid's snack and therefore lacking in depth of taste. It's sweet, rather strongly caramel with a hint of cheap chocolate, but that makes it inoffensive, not good.

Bourbon Petit Corn Potage Snack

Some time ago, I had a savory food craving and went a little overboard buying rice-cracker-like snacks. Since then, those purchased in salt-craving haste have been languishing in my bin of snacks to be reviewed. I picked up three Bourbon Petit sleeves at that time, and this was one that sat dejected and neglected. The first packet was chili tomato crackers, and I should learn from this experience that a craving for crispy salty delights can be satiated by one package, and does not require four different options.

I'm an immense fan of corn potage, a type of soup made with cream, corn, onion, garlic, and chicken stock. Because of this, I've sampled every corn potage snack I've found in Japan and this one wasn't going to get away from me. That being said, I haven't always had the greatest luck with the snacks (though I always love the soup and even make my own).

When I saw this package, I had visions of sembei (rice cracker) nirvana with a savory dusting of corn potage flavor powder. What I got was a very bizarre wafer thin cracker which brought to mind Cap'n Crunch cereal (or any corn based cereal). The cereal aspect came through not only because they are corn-based, but also because they are so sweet. I know that corn often carries a certain sweetness, but this is the result of way too much Sucralose in the mix. If these had been little Cap'n Crunch chips though, my opinion would be far more favorable. Adding in savory elements changes the entire balance of the universe though.

You have to eat quite a few to start to tunnel through to the savory elements. Corn is there, yes, and a little salt. If you toss enough in your mouth at once, you can even pick up a bit on the garlic and parsley, but I'm not necessarily recommending gobbling them down by the handful. While not incredibly awful or anything, they are just plain weird. Though crispy, there's something about the texture that also didn't work. It was as if this didn't know if it wanted to be a cracker or a chip, so it tried to be both and failed on both fronts.

The only point with which I can recommend these is as cheap diet food. One sleeve is only about 70 yen (84 cents) and 32 grams (a little over an ounce) are only 145 calories. However, if you care about how your food tastes, you may want to spend more calories on something that is actually enjoyable.

Heinz Tomato Ketchup Corn Snack

 The name of this snack sounds like someone is spelling out the product a little too clearly. Back home, I think these might be called "ketchup puffs", or maybe even "Heinz balls." Okay, maybe the latter wouldn't be acceptable in polite company. In Japan there are often these overly explanatory names of certain things that have a foreign origin. We wouldn't say "tomato ketchup" because we assume all ketchup is made with tomatoes. Similarly, the Japanese call coffee cups "mug cups". A mug is a cup, but they have a different word to differentiate a coffee cup from other types of cups.

Getting to the product at hand, I found this 60 gram (approximately 2 ounces) bag at Okashi no Marche discount snack shop in Koenji. I need to do a bit on that particular shop some time because it is like the deep discount version of a discount snack shop. They have cardboard boxes full of very cut price items and these were a mere 50 yen (60 cents). That makes them about half price. In Tokyo, it's not uncommon for stores to offer discounts as paltry as 3% and exceptionally rare to find a discount this high on anything. I've never seen a place that dealt in soon to expire food with steep price cuts because I think such items would not appeal to Japanese folks who have a scrutinizing eye when it comes to freshness.

Honestly, I'm not a huge fan of ketchup. I'm more of a mayo and mustard girl, but I don't detest it. I wouldn't have purchased this if it weren't so cheap. That being said, ketchup has grown on me to a small extent as the years have gone by. There used to be a time when I couldn't abide even a dollop of it in a larger preparation, but I've used it in homemade vegetarian burgers and even in omurice.

It's a good thing that I've found that I can enjoy ketchup to some extent because these are intensely flavored with it. If you like upending the bottle into your waiting mouth or licking it off a spoon, this is the snack for you. It is nicely salted (not too much, not too little) and crispy and just puffy enough without being too airy. The tomato flavor is also very prominent.

I liked these, but I think I wouldn't buy them again as I'm simply not that big a fan of ketchup. I believe they are well-made, but too one-note. The Frito-Lay Japanese condiment-based snacks are so over the top flavor-wise that they are hard to resist even when they're not up my flavor alley. I'll keep trying them, even if I expect to never want them again.

Frito Lay Takoyaki (Octopus Dumpling) Snack

I've mentioned before that I have never tried actual takoyaki (octopus dumpling), though I think this year will finally be the year that I lose my "octopus" virginity. I'm thinking I'll take the plunge and sample the real deal this New Year's if a takoyaki stand shows up at the local shrine on New Year's day. In the meantime, I purchased this bag of Frito Lay takoyaki corn snack as a way of going to 3rd base before I make a run for home plate. If these aren't bad, how terrible can the real deal be?

I have seen this snack in many shops and it can be had for about 100 yen ($1.20) at most supermarkets, snack shops, and drug stores. I haven't seen so many of them at convenience stores, but this isn't a new release so that is no surprise. Each bag is 70 grams (2.5 oz.) and has 351 calories. 

The picture on the front of the bag talks about how these have octopus powder, onion, aosa (which is "sea lettuce") and Otafuku sauce among other flavors. Otafuku sauce appears simply to be the brand name of a type of sauce commonly put on takoyaki and I think it is likely the main flavor component of this snack. When I opened the bag, I wasn't greeted with any particularly noxious odors. In fact, they smelled like any other bag of spicy corn snacks that one might buy without any funky seafood overtones.

Each little ball is a perfectly average and pleasantly crunchy corn puff coated with a variety of seasonings. There's definitely some onion powder and some sort of vinegary flavoring with a hint of soy sauce. The thing that I don't taste much of is any sort of strong seafood taste. This is mainly a savory blending of rich vegetable flavors with deep vinegar and a bit of soy. The salt level is about right to add bite but not to overwhelm.

This was a decent enough snack. It's not the sort of thing that I could see craving or wanting to buy again, but if I had a desire for something salty, I wouldn't turn my nose up at these if someone placed a bowl in front of me. Mainly, I think this is designed for active fans of Otafuku sauce and those who associate that particular flavor with takoyaki. I have to imagine real octopus dumplings taste more like, well, octopus. I'll probably finish the bag very, very slowly since I'm not over the moon about it. I wouldn't recommend it as a casual experimental sampling, but I think fans of takoyaki may find it rather pleasing.

Calbee Cheese Bit Corn Snack

There is some debate in this age of hyper-awareness of nutrition as to whether or not corn is a healthy vegetable as opposed to a "fun" one like the ever-wonderful potato. In Japan, I'm pretty sure that corn is still seen as hanging around in the same circles as carrots and tomatoes when it comes to health, or at least the way in which this product is presented on Calbee's vegetable snacks web site gives me that impression.

I found this bag of salty, cheesy snacks at Seiyu supermarket in Ogikubo after a visit to the dentist. I noted that this was not on offer at the Seiyu in my area, though there is no reason why that should be other than limited shelf space in all stores. After all, Calbee is a big salted snack maker and always gets its chips on the shelves. One of the things that drew me to them was the fact that they are cheese, and, you know, cheese! The other is the fact that the entire 60-gram (2.1 oz.) bag is only 307 calories. The volume is large enough that I could see getting three generous portions for only about 100 calories each.

This is 1/3 of the bag or about a 100 calorie portion. Each chip is about 3 cm. x 2 cm. (1.2 in. x .8 in.).

These smell rather mildly of the sort of fake powdered cheese that those of us who make junk a regular part of our lives are well and truly familiar with. Each light, beautifully crispy bit is lightly dusted in cheese powder which is supposed to combine Parmesan, Cheddar and Camembert flavors.

The taste is on the mild side, but has the pungent notes you'd expect from a cheese snack. The first handful doesn't deliver much other than crunch with a little salt, but subsequent consumption allows for the cheesy flavors to build up a bit and take on some definition. You can really detect the Parmesan in particular, and the sweet corn that is used to form the base. In fact, the savory nature of the sweet corn is really where these shine. It's a very nice flavor.

I wasn't keen on these at first, but they really grew on me as the flavors infiltrated my taste buds. My husband ate a handful and said they didn't taste like anything to him, so the flavors might be far too subtle for some people to enjoy. I wish the cheese flavors were more pronounced, but I really loved the sweet corn flavor of the chips. They're also really light and not oily at all. If you want something salty and crispy but not as oily or flavorless as plain potato chips, I would definitely recommend giving these a try.

Note that the web site for these chips mentions an "original character" called "Chizubi", a little cartoon dog. If you have a cell phone, you can use it to read one of those square bar codes and see some special deals related to this cute little character. Since I don't have a cell phone, I guess I'm out of luck.

Meiji Very Hot Curry "Karl"

In Japan, you don't have to settle for a "hot Carl". You can get a "red hot Carl".

One of these days, I need to have a contest in which I post a food item and ask readers to enter their ideas about the ingredients in that item based on the sometime esoteric inclusions I've mentioned in former posts. It's easy to guess that something like curry, chicken, and onion flavors are in a baked corn snack like this one, but what are the chances of guessing that it includes "pineapple powder"? Ah, Meiji, you tricky devils!

"Karl", or as we might say in English, "curl", is a popular brand of salted snack from Meiji. In various flavors, sizes,  and packages, these can be found in most convenience stores and markets. When I was working, I often saw them sold in foil lined paper cups like Calbee's Jaga Rico. They were first introduced in 1968 in a cheese flavor and a curry version first came out in 1969. There's an interesting scrolling photo history of all of the flavors, designs, and packages since the product's inception here.

There are instructions on the back of the bag telling you how to tear it down the seam if you're offering these at a party.

When I saw this bag of corn snacks perched outside of Okashi no Machioka in a box labeled "69 yen" (75 cents), I jumped at the chance to try it. Not only was it marked down in price, but it was also new to may area and it has flames all over the bag. Little encourages me more than the chance of something red hot. It doesn't hurt that the entire 48 gram (1.7 oz.) bag weighs in at 246 calories. That's a bit on the low side for a salted snack food of this sort in Japan considering their penchant for high fat counts. The size is such that I felt quite full after eating just half of it.

When I first opened the bag, I caught a whiff of what I could colorfully refer to as "corrupted curry". There are definitely curry elements, but there's more. The curls themselves are puffy and satisfyingly crispy. They have a nice depth of flavor from all of the seasonings that are layered onto them, which include various seafood powders, pork, and soy sauce in addition to the aforementioned ingredients.

Sometimes the heat that is advertised on Japanese snacks is sub par, but these are gratifyingly hot. They also have a cumulative fiery effect that makes your tongue get a better burn as you eat more of them. They may not satisfy the most ardent hot pepper lovers, but they pleased me.

I enjoyed these and would definitely buy them again if I wanted something hot and salty to snack on. I was really happy with the flavor depth as that is something that some corn-based snacks are lacking in my experience. If you want something hot and spicy to have with a soda or alcoholic beverage, I'd recommend giving these a go. You won't be disappointed, and they aren't as fattening as such foods can get.

If you'd like to download some items that have the mascot's theme (the frog and farmer), you can find some message cards, a coloring page for kids, and some tickets here.

Doll Festival Corn Puff Snack

March 3 is the date of the "Doll Festival" holiday in Japan. In keeping with my efforts to sample more food associated with special days in Japan, I picked up this bag of corn puff snacks for 98 yen ($1.08) at a local green grocer. I've seen these types of puffs everywhere in different packaging, and I'd be very surprised if there was a significant difference between brands. They all look the same.

The Doll Festival, or 雛祭り, Hina-matsuri, in Japanese, is an old festival which has little real meaning these days. Mainly, people with daughters put up a large display of dolls that represent a royal court. That's the reason the bag of corn puffs pictured above has an elaborately dressed couple. They represent the emperor and empress dolls in the display.

The dolls used to have a spiritual meaning, but these days they're like Christmas trees in that there was an original meaning that is no longer considered or even known by most people. I've talked to students about the dolls they had in their displays when they were little girls and they told me that they were pretty, but they weren't allowed to touch them or play with them. The dolls are generally quite expensive and some of them are passed down from generation to generation. Depending on the type of dolls and how elaborate the display, they can cost well over 100,000 yen ($1,108).

There are a wide variety of sweets associated with the holiday, but the most common consumer ones that are sold in markets and convenience stores are the type of corn puff I'm reviewing and a block of tightly pressed little balls (made with rice, I believe). They're like a uniform popcorn ball made with tiny peas instead of popcorn. I've had the little bricks of compressed rice and I do like them. They are available year-round, but the Doll Festival version is pink, white, and green. The kind that you can buy any time are less pretty, but taste the same. I hope to review them some time in the future.


These little puffs are varied in size. The little ones are like a slightly inflated grain of rice. All of them are the same. The ingredients list includes sugar, flour, rice, and corn grits. There were 70 grams (2.5 oz.) in the bag that I bought. I think it might be about two and a half cups if you measured it out. Unfortunately, there was no nutrition information so I can't say how many calories they contain.

These don't smell like much of anything, though there is a vaguely cereal-like scent. This isn't surprising since these puffs are essentially a version on a corn-based kid's cereal. They're not quite as crisp or sweet as something like Corn Pops, but the flavor is so similar that you could probably eat these with milk and think you were having breakfast on a Saturday morning in your childhood.

If you're the type of person who likes eating crunchy sugar cereals dry out of the box (and who isn't), then you're likely to enjoy these. They're not exactly the same as the stuff back home (assuming you grew up where I did - I can't speak for cereal in other countries), but they're very close. These are good and I enjoyed them, but I have to imagine you could put away a lot of it mindlessly and pack in the calories. You'll enjoy it, but your waist might not.

White Gratin Curl

Sometimes you see a product and never give its name a second thought. Take the "Curl" line of processed corn snacks as an example. I've seen a variety of these little cups of salted snack food badness around for well over a decade, but I never noticed that they are straight sticks. There's absolutely nothing curly about these curls except the flourishes on the katakana writing of the name.

Most of the time, Curl products (made by Meiji) are flavored with curry or cheese, so this white gratin variation caught my eye. One of my favorite foods from Japanese restaurants early on during my stay was a mushroom rice gratin that was sold at an ostensibly "Mexican" restaurant near my home. With fond memories of that dish (before the restaurant swapped to Korean barbecue joint), I picked this up.


After peeling off the foil top, I gave it a sniff and was greeted with the scent of cheese powder, much like that in thousands of other cheesy corn snacks, though this was a bit less pungent than something like Cheetos. The first taste was of cheese, followed by onion, corn and a hint of parsley. These are rather salted, but not overdone. The texture is light and crispy. They remind me of a super puffy Cheeto.

The flavorings in these include pork oil, chicken extract powder, cheese powder, onion powder, whey powder, and parsley. It's nicely savory and has slightly interesting flavors, but is dominated by a rather artificial cheese and onion taste. The entire 41 gram (1.4 oz.) container has 228 calories. It felt like a whole lot of calories for very little substance and that is one reason that I wouldn't buy these again. It just felt like too little pleasure for the caloric investment. If I'm going to go for something salty as food amusement, I think I can do better elsewhere.

Note: This product is named after a corn puff type snack which actually is curl-shaped. I realize it is a brand name rather than a description of the snacks in this cup.

Yahoo! Majimori Corn Snack Tonkotsu Rich Miso

This is the second of two Majimori corn snacks based on ramen flavors. The first variety was "brown oil, garlic, and pork bone" flavor and I was rather fond of it. As I mentioned in the previous review, this product is a collaboration between several companies - Maruchan, Yahoo Japan, Frito-Lay and Tokyo Web Week 1.

Tonkotsu is the Japanese word for pork bone so both of the Majimori flavors are made with pork flavor. Since ramen is often flavored with pork, this is no surprise. By the way, ramen in Japan is sometimes the same sort of dried out noodles with salty flavor packets that is so common in Western countries, but the really good stuff is sold at food stands or restaurants and it's rather far removed from the cheap stuff college students use to fortify them when they've spent too much on beer and are looking at providing themselves with sustenance on a few dollars they found crammed under their roommates dirty socks.


The bar that is set for matching good ramen is significantly higher than the bar with living up to really cheap, dehydrated ramen. Since the first variety that I tried lived up to the complexity of the flavor, I fully expected this one to as well and I wasn't disappointed. Once again, all of the elements of well made ramen were there.

If you open the bag and give it a good sniff, you can smell cabbage, corn and a bit of a spicy, oil smell which is reminiscent of sesame oil. The interesting thing about the corn aroma and taste is that it is not the processed corn snack variety. It's the actual taste and smell of corn kernels. The cabbage flavor is also very present as is the taste of oily pork. The finish on them is one of spicy heat.

Unlike the brown oil pork and garlic flavor, the first bite has complex and rich flavors. You don't need to keep eating for the flavor to build its way up. I liked this, but the thing about both of the Majimori flavors is that they so successfully carry the oily flavor of ramen broth and this makes it less appealing for me personally. I imagine this is great for lovers of oil infused with rich, dense flavors, but it's just not my thing. I'd certainly give these another try if I was in the mood. Given my particular tastes though, that mood is unlikely to come around very often.

Mayo Mania Corn Snacks

When you think of big mayonnaise eaters, my guess is that the majority of people are not thinking of all the trim Japanese people walking around in their smart business clothes or even the tiny geisha in their kimono. I'm guessing the only Japanese people most Western folks envision scarfing down the mayonnaise are sumo wrestlers. The truth is so much more disturbing than most people realize.

The Japanese love mayonnaise. There is even a fan club called "We Love Mayo!" If you look at the bag pictured above, you see a graphic of someone pouring a tube of mayo right into his mouth. On the back of the bag (not pictured), there's another graphic of a man squirting two tubes of mayo into his mouth. This actually is an attractive notion to some Japanese people. Personally, I would find having to eat mayo straight from the bottle/tube a form of torture. That's not to say that I don't like mayo. I do like to put a bit of light mayonnaise on some types of sandwiches, but my appreciation ends there. It's a condiment, not a meal and I'd no sooner pour it straight into my mouth than I'd drink from a ketchup bottle.

In the interest of snack food testing, and because I can't resist some weird ass foods, I bought this Mayo Mania corn snack at a Family Mart convenience store. It cost about 120 yen ($1.22) for 60 grams (2.1 oz.). The whole bag is 319 calories. This is the regular mayo flavor, but there is also a version with a blue bag which is "tuna mayo" that was not in stock.


The rings look a lot like Funyuns. They also have a similar light crispy texture to those same processed onion rings. Since both Mayo Mania and Funyuns are made by Frito Lay, this is no surprise. Opening the bag is a bit like huffing a jar or mayonnaise, the smell hits you pretty clearly though the smell isn't nearly as potent as the taste. These taste like eating a spoon full of mayonnaise with a spicy chaser at the end. The front of the bag proudly boasts that the flavor has been doubled in intensity, and boy howdy, do I believe it.

I ate these along with a chicken sandwich (which I intentionally left the mayonnaise off of) in order to dilute the experience and it was still pretty overwhelming. These are good. The saltiness, crunch, and added spicy heat are nice, but the mayo flavor is so strong that I couldn't see trying them again nor wold I recommend them to any but the most ardent lovers of mayonnaise.

Yahoo! Japan Majimori Corn Snack Brown Oil Pork & Garlic

Yahoo is regarded as second to Google when it comes to home pages and search engines among most folks in the West. In Japan, Yahoo is the bee's knees to Google's bee's, uh, little toes. This is why Yahoo gets its own brand of corn snack. Well, not exactly its own. This is a collaborative effort between Maruchan, maker of cup-a-ramen type products, Yahoo Japan, Frito-Lay, and Tokyo Web 1 Week (a magazine). They all came together to create some sort of promotion which would draw attention to all of them.


These were released on February 16 and I picked mine up at a convenience store for 99 yen ($1.06). The bag contains 55 grams (about 2 oz.) of corn snacks which will set you back 295 calories if you snarf it all down. The web site talks about how these are meant to resemble ramen flavored with "thick brown oil", pork bone, ginger, and garlic. There is another ramen flavored corn snack which has been released at the same time as this one, but it wasn't on sale locally. The other one is spicy miso and tonkatsu (fried pork cutlet).

When I opened the bag and gave it a sniff, I really couldn't identify the scent. It's such a melange of flavors that it defies easy identification. It doesn't smell particularly bad, nor particularly good. When I first started eating them, I had a strong sense of a lot of foreplay with no finish. There seemed to be an immense and complex hit of flavor with only a bit of an oily follow-up. As I ate more and more of them, the savory flavors separated out into pork, green onion, ginger, and garlic. Cumulatively, the garlic seems to become more and more present as the flavor builds up, but that pork bone flavor is strongly there as well.

When I first started eating these, I wasn't very impressed, by about the 10th puff, I was hooked. They are so savory and complex in flavor and get better and better as time goes by. From a flavor viewpoint, this is good. From the viewpoint of eating more of something which really isn't good for you, it's rather bad. Still, this is a limited edition product which I'm sure won't be around forever and worth a one time indulgence. I'd definitely recommend trying them.

Cheese Rounds (Marui Cheezu) Snack

For foreign folks, there is no more treacherous territory in Japan than snacks and sweets purporting to be "cheese". On the sweet side, you have to brave sponge and cheesecakes made with the likes of Gouda or even variations on cheddar. You can buy a lovely looking sponge cake and get hit with a tangy, savory cheese bomb when you bite into it. On the salty side, more often than not, you get flat, lifeless moderately salty corn puffs or chips with flavorless yellow or orange dust.

Personally, I like my cheese flavor strong on a salted snack. The purpose of the delivery device is to bring the crunch and the flavor is supposed to be carried in the powder. Planter's used to sell canisters of "Cheese Balls" (possibly "Cheeze Balls", I'm not up on my dubious spelling) which was the sublime embodiment of salted cheese snack treats. This is the gold standard by which all cheese snacks should be judged. They were so well-loved that there's one of those useless Internet petitions begging Planter's to bring them back.


Enter Riska's Cheese Rounds. These can be bought for 27 yen per 17 gram bag/.6 oz. (or 4 bags for a dollar/99 yen). The portion is small, but should be attractive to folks who want 100 calorie deliveries since the bag of 12 or so rings is 94 calories. The question is, are these rings a worthy competitor for Planter's Cheese Balls? The answer is, they are not only worthy to compete, but to succeed. They even have an anthropomorphic mascot on the cover to duke it out with Mr. Peanut. If you can't tell, that's a very excited pan of melted cheese with broccoli on his fork on the package cover. Mr. Peanut has limbs to punch and kick with, but this pan is piping hot and armed. It'd be one hell of a cartoon mascot match.

When you open the bag, it smells tangy and cheesy. The texture of the rings is crispy and light. There is a lot of flavored powder on the rings, but it doesn't stick to your fingers as badly as the powder from something like a Cheeto, though it does adhere to your fingers a little. The taste is richly cheesy, slightly salty, and a little buttery. One of the ingredients is "creaming powder", so that may be where the buttery sense comes from. It also includes whey, paprika, cheese powder, Sucralose, and added calcium. I've noticed that just the right amount of sweetness is often mixed into Riska salted snacks to enhance their savory nature.

These are not only the best cheese snacks I've had in Japan, but possibly better than any I've had in the U.S. If you find yourself in a Japanese market looking for cheesy munchies, skip the imported or domestic Cheetos which are so readily available and track down a bag of Riska's Cheese Rounds. You won't regret it.

Nihon Nagai Choco (Japan Long Chocolate)

There is a class of snacks in Japan for which I'd like to coin a new term. I christen this group of food items "little big snacks"®. These are items that are strangely large, but marketed as if they were normal size or even small snacks. This kid's treat (brought to you by Riska, maker of all sorts of cheap kid's snacks) called Nihon nagai choco falls into that odd category. Incidentally, "nagai" means "long" in Japanese.

The packaging on this is rather interesting because it is on the sexist side. If you click on the small picture at left to see a more legible size, you'll see that there are three cartoon characters with words written above them in English. The top one says "mama", the center one "boku", and the bottom one "papa". "Boku" is the way in which males can refer to themselves. That is, it's a manly way of saying "me" or "I". Women and girls never say "boku". Papa also gets a repeat viewing on the back and mama gets one lousy picture.

So, boys are supposed to look at this and say, "Here's my boyish/manly snack as indicated by my family's depiction on the label. Aren't I a little big man?" Okay, he's not going to say that. I'm guessing what he's going to say is something like, "why did my cheap ass parents buy me a 27 yen snack stick instead of a Wii?".

This is a typical kid's treat in Japan. It's super light, coated in a light film of fake chocolate, and made of corn. It's also fortified with calcium. The whole stick is 126 calories despite the fact that it's about 10 inches (25.4 cm) long. It's chock full of air pockets, but this doesn't have to be a bad thing. Air has no calories, after all.

You could pretend it's a super long cigar or, um, something else that resembles a long, brown log.

When you open the package, it smells very good. It smells of peanuts, cocoa, and sugar (all of which are ingredients, unsurprisingly). When you bite into it, you get a heavy hit of cereal taste. If you imagine a crispy rice bit from a Nestle Crunch blown up to gargantuan size and elongated, I imagine that's what this is. It's very crunchy and plenty sweet, although not in a sugary burning of your throat manner. The chocolate taste is surprisingly rich for such a thin coating, though there are no discernible peanut notes.

When you look at it on end like this, it looks like the suckers at the end of a squid's tentacles. But, that might just be my impression.

All in all, this is one pleasant little big treat. It's got great texture and just enough flavor to blend in with the cereal base inside. Keep in mind that there are other brands of this sort of thing out there and not all of them are good. I've had one of these before as part of a Japanese Christmas treat pack and sampled another one given to my husband and neither was as nice as this one from Riska. Apparently, brand name matters even in super cheap kid's snacks.

If you're in the mood for something crunchy and sweet, but a bit lighter than a Crunky bar, I'd recommend giving this a try. For 27 yen, it's a sure winner, though you may have to pretend you're a boy while you eat it.