Random Picture 59

Strawberry and chocolate dacquoise on sale at a Family Mart convenience store.

Food fads are so common in Japan that they overlap. Mostly, we see a certain type of food (like rusks) spread while a certain flavor also starts to proliferate. Right now, orange seems to be the flavor du jour. Entire displays of orange-flavored snacks are in some convenience stores. Rusks are still running their course as a fad, but I think they're petering out and I think that dacquoise, a French confection with a meringue base, may be poised to jump off the mark as the next food fad. My feeling is that dacquoise are the logical next step in the long-running popularity of macarons, and they're not as delicate and easier to put in shelf-stable packaging.

Variety Friday: The Banana Fad

The winter preoccupation with kinako (toasted soy flour) and mochi (rice cake) seems to be entering it's end game. The new fad is banana. My husband was given the sticker pictured above when he bought a banana doughnut at the Doughnut Plant. The flip side of this sticker gives a short history of both Chiquita Banana and the New York City Doughnut Plant chains. Unfortunately, the donut itself left something to be desired.

At any rate, banana-flavored items are everywhere right now. Various sweets are exploding in places like New Days convenience store. I've also noticed banana pretzel sticks (like Pocky), cookies, cakes, and various other sweets in the local markets.

I wonder how it is decided that every company is going to start pumping out food in one particular flavor. Awhile ago, there was a huge rush on all of the bananas in Japan because an overweight television personality mentioned that she lost weight by eating bananas for or with breakfast each morning. Though the show she discussed her diet on said that her technique would work if one ate any fruit, everyone fixated on bananas. For awhile, those of us who enjoyed the occasional banana couldn't find any in the shops, but that seemed to have settled down.

That craze for real bananas may or may not have spawned the current fad. It might be that companies felt that a positive association was being formed or that people who had been noshing on bananas for the past 6 months or so have developed a taste for them. At any rate, this is the fad at hand at the moment so a few banana treats are likely to be reviewed soon.

Variety Friday: Kinako Mousse from Pizza Hut

How do you know when a particular flavor has made the journey from flash in the pan to genuine fad? You know when the major fast food joints start including that flavor in its short-lived side dishes and extras. Kinako, toasted soybean flour, officially has "arrived" as the food fad of this winter/spring when places like Pizza Hut maneuver dishes incorporating that taste into their menu.

This dessert is a light vanilla mousse with a kinako top layer. One of the selling points is that the soy flour is produced with 100% domestic soybeans. There has been a lot of anxiety over the past year or so about food grown in China and consumers feel reassured when they learn something is grown in Japan. My feeling has been that the safety issues with Chinese food have been overblown to boost sales of more expensive Japanese agricultural products.

These desserts are delivered to you frozen so you can't eat them right away. They're about 20 cm (7.8 in) in diameter and cost ¥1200 ($12.20). I've had many varieties of these and they are always the same thing. There is a base made of sponge cake or light pie crust topped with a layer of light, fatty mousse which resembles whipped cream. It's not too sweet, but also not intensely flavorful. Often, there are two layers of mousse of different flavors, though not always.

In the past, I've tried chestnut (marron), chocolate, and vanilla varieties, but I have not sampled this kinako number. The reason for this is that, though the Pizza Hut mousse desserts are always kind of nice, they're greatly over-priced for their quality and quantity. You could buy 4 nice fresh cakes at a premium cake shop for the same price as 4 servings of this mousse. Pizza Hut is hoping to get people to overspend and buy something with their pizzas because they happen to have a craving for sweets and are too lazy to go out in get something. This might be worth it at half the price, or if it was fresh rather than something they keep stacked up in their freezers.