Random Picture #219

I used to get irritated when I was in Japan and the Japanese perception of American food and culture was limited to hamburgers, steak, fries, and bread. It was as if they couldn't accept that Americans ate a broader range of foods than those available on the McDonald's menu.

Now, I get to turn my irritation toward Americans who think that Japanese food is focused on daily consumption of green tea, sushi, and, apparently, Pocky. In Japanese markets, which tend to cater mainly to Japanese folks, but also want to attract other people interested in all things Japanese as well, I've found that there is an over-abundance of certain types o things and green tea is definitely one of them. The display above was at Marukai market (last week) and shows a heavy concentration of snacks made with green tea. I realize that this is seasonal (and I showed a picture of a strawberry snacks display before), but I've also found that other flavors are rather slim pickings.

It's nice to know that stereotypical and simplified notions of other cultures are one of the things which most cultures will always share. 

A Plethora of Tirol Choco Releases (product information)

All images come from Tirol.

I can't hit every single new snack every week because there just aren't enough hours in the day, but, when I finally checked Tirol's web site, I felt like I'd seriously fallen down on the job. They've got a little crazy for spring, so I'll get cracking on talking about what is out there.

At the top of this post, there are special bags of dinsaurs depicted in a game called AR3D. I had never heard of this game before, but it is an Android application and Tirol is more than happy to give you at directions for how to play if you're unfamiliar with it. They've also rather graciously posted all 100 of the graphics for you to see so that you know exactly which ones you still need to collect.

For the less game-happy set, they've got some releases that mimic traditional spring flavors and sweets. Sakura mochi, which includes green tea powder, a "mochi" gummi center, sakura (cherry blossom) pink chocolate and a chocolate base should set your inner office lady afire.

For the more conservative set, Tirol has a green tea mochi variety. This also includes a gummi center to mimic the chewy nature of stretchy pounded rice cake with green tea powder and white chocolate.

Finally, lest the traditional sorts feel over-catered to and the kids feel under-served, there's one more new product which seems geared toward the younger set. This is a rice puff chocolate which promises to be both crunchy and light. My experience with these in the past has yielded a fairly sweet chocolate base to cater to the palates of the diminuitive set.

It's clear that after the post-holiday lull, the push is on for spring releases. It'll give everyone something to nosh on while they view the cherry blossoms.

Random Picture #187

Nestle Japan is mainly recognized for its KitKats, but it has been introducing the Crunch bar to the Japanese market. They didn't sell them as individual bars when I was there, but they sold them as mini bars in large bags. For this reason, I never bought a Nestle crunch bar in Japan as I didn't want to buy an enormous bag of them.

One of the reasons the Crunch brand isn't as well known as KitKats is that Nestle Japan didn't go crazy offering a lot of varieties, though they did offer a green tea variety (which I can still buy here but according to the Nestle Japan web site, it's now "obsolete") and are currently offering a vanilla caramel version.

I used to love Nestle's Crunch bar when I was a kid and it was my second favorite candy bar to see in my trick-or-treat bag (the first was Snickers). Since coming home, I've found that the quality has changed or my tastes have. It's not the thrill it once was.

Haagen Dazs Japonais Ice Cream (product announcement)

Starting from October 6, Haagen Dazs will be offering a "Japonais" flavor of ice cream in single serving containers. I have done the minimal amount of investigation and learned that the name of this is French for "Japanese". I guess that lends this an air of elegance, but it seems a little silly using a French name on an American ice cream in Japan. That being said, I'm sure that this is not a rare attempt to add a little European flair to a product by giving it a more "exotic" sounding name.

I've mentioned before in this blog that what people who aren't Japanese regard as more adventurous or exotic flavors than the dreck we get here at home are actually pretty conservative in Japan. This red bean and green tea ice cream, though it looks lovely in the illustration, is downright boring in its flavor options. Red beans and green tea are the equivalent of peanut butter and chocolate in Japan. They're everywhere and they're safe choices to cater to a market with conservative tastes. It's designed to set the hearts of young women with enough disposable income to pay $3-$4 for a tiny serving of ice cream aflutter.

Bourbon Alfort Green Tea Chocolate Biscuits

Several years ago, I sent a friend of mine a "care package" from Japan. I should call it, in retrospect, an "I don't care for" package as most of what I sent him wasn't exactly regarded with enthusiasm. Included was a bag of Japanese green tea, since was a green tea drinker at the time, some instant corn potage soup, some small salted snack things, and several chocolate items including a box of Alfort chocolate biscuits. I think he said either the corn potage snacks or the soup "tasted like Cap'n Crunch". I could understand why he'd say that since they are both made from corn and on the sweet side.

The green tea got the worst reception because he thought it looked like a bag of hash. At that time, I didn't know that Americans drank "green tea" which did not resemble Japanese green tea. For many, it was a sort of brownish stuff that lacked strong grassy notes or the scent of chlorophyll. I daresay that was not what he expected, but I did send along a teapot which he liked. He also liked the Alfort chocolate biscuits. They were the only clear winner among the food options.

Alfort is a very common brand of half-cookie/half-candy made by Bourbon and I was shocked when I looked through my archives and realized that I have never reviewed any of these products before. It's not like I scarfed them down with abandon in Japan, but I did have them on more than one occasion and found them quite enjoyable. You can usually find them at Lawson 100 for 100 yen or about a dollar in U.S. currency. The boxes carry a fair bit of heft and 12 little squares of cookie and candy merged together. It's good value for a solid product. The common flavors are chocolate, bitter chocolate, and white chocolate. This green tea flavor caught my eye mainly because, while green tea is a mainstream flavor in Japan, it's not one I'd noticed for Alfort before. That's not to say it wasn't around, but just that I didn't see it.

I found this at Mitsuwa market for a $1.69 (about 170 yen), which is pricy by Tokyo standards, but reasonable by American ones. The packaging says that it is made with "uji matcha", a green tea grown in Kyoto. I daresay that there is a flood of product on the market these days which touts its uji matcha connection and that it is a bona fide food fad now. It's not that green tea is in any way exotic, but just that this particular type of tea seems to have been swelling in popularity over the past year or so.

The concept of Alfort is simple. Half is a bit of chocolate, pure and simple, with a little biscuit stuck on the back-side. All of the varieties of these candies have a picture of a boat on them for reasons I can't figure out. If the box says so, I can't read it as an enormous sticker translating the nutrition information and ingredients is covering most of it. I'm guessing it doesn't say so at any rate, and my search on the word "Alfort" was no help. It's a commune. It's a veterinary school. It's a botanical garden. It's the name of an English cricket player. Most disturbingly, it's the name of a museum of "anatomical oddities". No, I did not try to look at the linked page in regards tot he museum.

I'm just going to look at the ship on my cookie and pretend that it's a pirate boat and that the president of Bourbon is cool enough to put pirates on his chocolate biscuits. That will make sampling them more enjoyable, not that they need a boost in enjoyment. These are pretty tasty little morsels, as long as you like green tea.

As green tea flavors go, this one is certainly more potent than some of the snacks I've tried as of late. The aroma rather strongly hits you when you break the seal and it is the smell that you detect when you open up a bag of green tea leaves. It could be that all of the scent trapped tightly in the wrapper makes it super strong, but it is still very present when you eat the cookie. It's a very good combination of green tea bitterness with white chocolate sweetness. In fact, as I sample more green tea sweets, I think that it works much better with white chocolate than any other flavor. Fruit flavors, for instance, tend to layer sweetness on sweetness. This creates more of a balance.

The cookie itself mainly adds texture, but it's got some heft for its tiny size due to the cookie's thickness and higher than average quality. For a consumer level product, the cookie has better shortbread notes than I'd expect. While it lacks a buttery flavor to add depth, it has a crumbly goodness and some flaky layering that make it a very satisfying counter-point to the somewhat rich and sweet chocolate. Its blandness also helps balance out the chocolate's sweetness.

Do I think this is the greatest cookie and chocolate on earth? Certainly not. Did I enjoy it? Absolutely. The thing about certain types of flavors is that they play better as small portions for novelty and attentive enjoyment. This isn't the type of product that you'd buy a box of to take to a movie and chow down with, unless you grew up with green tea sweets and that's what you did for your entire life. It's more the type that you'd eat one or two of with a cup of coffee or tea and really savor the flavor balance. For marginally adventurous palates, I'd definitely say that this is worth a try.

Tirol Green Tea Parfait (product announcement)

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

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

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

Mister Ito American Soft Uji Matcha Chocolate Chip Cookies (product information)

Image lifted from Candysan's web site. And, no, they did not bribe me to link to them. They just had the biggest picture that I could rip off. 

I couldn't figure out why a brand being named "Mr. Ito" struck me as funny. After all, we have "Mrs. Fields" in the United States, and her cookies were pretty popular until she sold out and they started to be sucky mall fare. Also, just as "Mrs. Fields" and "Mr. Ito" are both real people using their real names, unlike, say "Mrs. Butterworth". So, what's the weirdness? Well, it's the combination of Asian and occidental (Note: I am prohibited from using "oriental" as a pairing with "occidental" because I'm home now and must be politically correct at all times, even if the Japanese use the word "oriental" themselves.) It's not "Ito-san", it's Mr. Ito.

The folks at Mr. Ito are nothing if not international, and that's what compelled me to highlight these cookies as a product. They were released in February 2012, so they're actually a bit long in the tooth. They caught my eye because of the strange irony of a cookie called "American Soft" being sold in a green tea flavor. Further research reveals that the target market for these is 20-50-year-old Japanese ladies. There's very little "American" about them, beyond the half-Westernized name of the company's founder and the chocolate chips.

Nanao Green Tea Papiro Cookies

When I hear "Nanao", I think "monitors", not confections. Apparently, my knowledge is rather outdated, however, because that company is now called Eizo, no doubt because they were tired of people walking into their stores and expecting sweet, sweet candy and finding that gnawing on the edges of a display did nothing but damage their dental work. Actually, I'm sure that the display maker is much better known than Nanao Confectionary, which is a relatively small business in Kitakyushu with a mere 280 employees as compared to mighty Eizo's stable of 1637. When you're me, you learn these types of things. I do this not because such things are important, but just because the information is out there... like a digital Mt. Everest only with much less death and excitement.

I know Nanao Confectionary best from the "Golusia" gaufrette European-style cookies and their even tastier Japanese-style ginger cookies. I reviewed both of these products favorably, and probably underestimated the appeal of the latter in my review. With a good track record, I was looking forward to sampling these papiro cookies. Incidentally, "papiro" is French for "papyrus" and refers to the fact that these are thin sheets of dough wrapped around themselves like a paper scroll. Papyrus scrolls, however, are not filled with tasty cream, just things like Egyptian hieroglyphs and family histories that Dan Brown can use to write novels.

I've had similar ones in Japan before, so I had some idea what to expect. My previous experiences taught me that these would be a crispy outer shell with supremely light, fatty filling. In fact, they are a rolled version of the gaufrette cookies and are likely made with exactly the same recipe. The outer shell is rather hard and quite brittle. It's mainly there for texture and as a delivery mechanism for the light as a cloud cream filling and it's modest green tea notes with faint sweetness. This is one of those very subtle Japanese sweets that is designed more for texture than taste. Your tongue has to almost strain to detect the flavors, but your mouth is so happy for the feeling that it's indifferent to the effort. At about 47 calories per small cookie (each is about the size of my pinkie finger, only a bit fatter), they won't break the calorie bank as long as you have some self-control.

I liked these a fair bit and I'd buy them again, but I have to confess that I have a lot of nostalgia associated with this style of snack and that they aren't especially sweet or strong-tasting. I found them and a Japanese market for about $2.20 (220 yen) and probably overpaid for them at that price. I think this is the sort of thing that Daiso Japan carries for $1.50 when they carry them. In fact, they often carry the vanilla papiro version of this so I may see if I can pick it up and try it out, too. Unfortunately, you can't order these online from Daiso Japan as their snack selection is very limited for web shoppers (it's much better in the actual stores).

If you like something subtle with some satisfying textural contrasts, then you may enjoy these. I'm not sure, however, that what is to my tastes in this case would necessarily suit my readers.

Glico Baton D'or

"Baton d'or" means "golden stick" in French. Naming any product in French instantly improves its cache. Instead of being a repackaged Pocky stick, with it's snappy name and Japanese pop cultural tones, it's a sophisticated pastry. The package designs make me think about diet foods with their attempts to emulate a slender, curvy feminine figure, but that is not what is on the minds of the folks at Glico. The thing that makes this stick "golden" is butter, lots and lots of butter. With that fact, it seems unlikely that this will do much to trim the waistline.

This brand has actually been around since around the middle of last year, but is being beefed up with new flavors and stripped of its chocolate coating. The pedestrian flavors (milk, white, strawberry, green tea, coffee) above are being supplanted at a grand release at Hankyu department store with butter sugar, cinnamon sugar, maple sugar, strawberry sugar, and green tea sugar. Though it may seem that sugar is the big deal with these high class pretzel sticks, the real selling point is that they are dipped in clarified butter after they're baked (and then dipped in sugar). If I were still in Japan, I would totally want to buy one of these, especially the cinnamon one since cinnamon snacks are relatively rare there, but Hankyu department store is in Osaka and that's a long way to go for a designer pretzel. It would take a magic stick made of real gold to get me to fork over the price of a Shinkansen ticket (over $100).

These will be available from June 12, 2013. I'm guessing that distribution will expand beyond Osaka eventually, but that information isn't clearly provided at this time.

Nabisco Oreo Green Tea Chocolate

Since returning to the U.S., I've learned that Oreo cookies are to the American market what KitKats once were to the Japanese one. If there's a crazy flavor variation to be found in a sweet, you can generally count on Nabisco to come up with something. I'm shocked at how many versions of Oreo-brand treats there are available on a regular basis, and surprised by the limited edition flavors like birthday cake, candy cane, and gingerbread. That being said, Oreos are sold in enormous packages. My husband bought a gingerbread one around the beginning of December and it still has between 1/3 and 1/4 left. It's a good thing they have a long shelf life because it takes us forever to eat through a package and we don't have a pet pig to feed things to.

Such issues are not a problem with Oreos in Japan. Not only are they limited in the scope of their releases, but the size of any given offering is quite small. This green tea chocolate Oreo snack has only eight 5.9 gram (.2 oz.) pieces. They are two small bites and only 32 calories each. This makes them close to the Oreo equivalent of a Hershey's Kiss in terms of overall size. So, this stuff isn't likely to be lying around for 5 months. Well, it might if it really sucks.

The beauty of mixing green tea with something like an Oreo cookie is that it is where sweet meets bitter. The odd thing is that most of the sweetness is coming from the green tea chocolate that is binding fractured bits of bitter chocolate Oreo cookies together. While I have not been the greatest fan of green tea sweets in the past, they have really started to grow on me and this one hit all of the right spots.

The smell when you open the package comes mostly from the green tea. The flavor is a very good mix of both the chocolate and the tea with the tea dominating at first and the cocoa flavor coming second. It's nice that such a tiny bite has a couple of flavor notes rather than lacking depth. The other thing which really hits me the right way is the textural contrast between the soft green tea chocolate and the crispy cookies. It's satisfyingly crunchy without being brittle or too hard.

If you hate green tea, you probably will not be a fan of this. It's definitely strong enough on the tea meter to put off anyone who isn't a fan. If you are a fan though, this is really good and worth a try. I got this courtesy of the fine folks at Candy-san. They are currently selling it for 210 yen, which is probably only about 50 yen more than it retails for in Japan and less than I'd have to pay for it in a Japanese market here. If you don't like them, at least your pet pig won't get fat if you feed him the leftovers. 

Nestle Ujimatcha Latte KitKat

Back when I did my Regional KitKats post, I mentioned that there was no need to despair over not being able to get these supposedly limited options because many of them have been released or will be released as regular flavors. Ujimatcha is a type of green tea grown in the Uji area and is known for being intense and sweet because the amino acids are kept intact when it is prepared. I don't know if this is true, or exactly what it means, but it's supposed to be vibrantly green and more finely milled than more pedestrian types of green tea. Uji is an area in Kyoto, and this is sold as a regional flavor KitKat.

The package you're seeing pictured here is a consumer level bag of minis sold pretty much anywhere that sells them. So, you see, no matter where you live, you can get this supposedly regional flavor. So there! Okay, this isn't exactly the same as the regional one since this has a semi-sweet chocolate base paired with the white chocolate ujimatcha top and is a "latte" flavor and the regional one is all green tea.

I found this as Nijiya Japanese market for $2.19 (206 yen). It's a pack of 7 single finger mini bars that look like a fat version of half a mini bar. For the quantity, it's slightly pricey, but not ridiculous. The strange thing about this KitKat was that I couldn't locate it on Nestle Japan's web site. That doesn't mean it's not there, but it is strange that it is not featured prominently somewhere. I do check the site regularly, and the expiration date on the bag is September 2013, so it can't be so old that it is outdated. This is the sort of thing that you think about when you're me.

As for the bar itself, it is actually quite different from the regular green tea KitKat. This has a creamy flavor which balances out both the semisweet base and bitter green tea very nicely. I generally don't care for green tea mixed with fairly present chocolate flavors, but it all came together really well in this tiny little bar. It has depth of flavor, but it doesn't come across as lacking in flavor harmony. It's neither too sweet nor lacking in sweetness. I was surprised at how nice it is.

I think this is absolutely one of the nicer consumer-level chocolates you can buy and well worth a sampling if none of the component flavors are something you're averse to. I could see this particular flavor profile with a better quality chocolate being produced by a more prestigious chocolatier. That being said, I still like the adult sweetness green tea bar better, but not by a huge margin.

Raspberry and Green Tea Adult Sweetness KitKats

As I mentioned in a previous post, November is KitKat month at SakuraBox. If you're interested in wrapping your lips around a good sampling of Japanese KitKats (5 different ones - pretty much the current line-up of non-regional options in Japan), this is your chance. With the weather finally turning more autumnal, it's safe for them to break out the chocolate, and, boy howdy, they are doing it right.

The two minis that I'm reviewing today are part of the monthly candy box. As full disclosure, I should mention that they send me one of these boxes gratis. You can consider me bribed, or you can consider me grateful for their generosity. I consider me lucky that after years and years of never getting one thing for free for review purposes, I can finally catch a ride of the small gravy train that I'd seen many other bloggers hitch onto.

All of that being said, I should say that how I feel about the snacks SakuraBox sends me has nothing to do with them. I already reviewed their service, which is the thing that directly reflects on them. How I feel about the KitKats is all on the fine folks at Nestle Japan. Today, I'm going to review two of the "adult sweetness" line which I have not reviewed before. The theme of this line is these KitKats are not as sweet as the regular ones. Therefore, they hold the promise of not being as cloyingly sweet as some of the other ones, especially the ones made with white chocolate.

In the past, I have favorably reviewed the white chocolate and regular chocolate ones, so I had high expectations of these ones. Note that, among the regular offerings of KitKats at present, the adult sweetness ones are quite prominent. It's my guess that these are going over pretty well with the Japanese market. This is no surprise as one of the big points that Japanense folks who visit America whine about is that the food is too sweet for them.

The first bar I tried was the raspberry adult sweetness bar. I was really hoping that this wouldn't be painfully sweet, and, happily, it wasn't. It smelled very intensely of raspberry so I was concerned about some strong artificial flavoring, but it actually was on the subtle side. It was ever so slightly tart and had approachable raspberry flavor. The outside was very soft and the wafers were crispy and fresh. This was very tasty and I appreciated that those who formulated it didn't feel it necessary to make it an avalanche of intense berry flavor and went with something that felt more like raspberries mixed into white chocolate.

As for the other bar, I sort of think of green tea as "mundane" in terms of flavors. I guess only someone like me who lived in Japan and was spoiled by the plethora of green tea options would consider a green tea variety "mundane". Sometimes, it is easy to forget that not everyone has had access to such goodies and that, yes, this may be exotic for some folks. After the subdued sweetness of the raspberry bar, I was actually slightly concerned that the bitter green tea might not be sufficiently offset by sugary goodness.

Fortunately, there was no bitterness nor was it overly sweet. There was a nice pure green tea flavor that was mellowed not by sugar, but by milky notes from the white chocolate base. Like the other, the wafers were nice and crispy, but this was mixed with a slightly grainy, finely gritty (but not at all unpleasant) texture in the chocolate. I loved the contrasting textures, and was surprised at how present but not overbearing the green tea flavor was. 

I really liked both of these bars, but found the green tea to be slightly better because I enjoyed the strength of the flavor more. I would certainly recommend either of these for anyone interested in flavor depth. They are absolutely better than some of the overly sweet bars I've sampled in the past.

I have been keeping an eye on the KitKat site off and on since I left Japan, and I'm wondering if Nestle Japan is changing their approach to the market place. While they may be selling weird flavors on occasion, I haven't seen any regular bars that are very esoteric on their web site for quite some time. Either they're not advertising them (unlikely), I missed them (somewhat likely), or they've figured out that too many of the bizarro flavors were ending up in candy bargain bins so they're reducing the frequency of issuing them (more likely). If this is so, this is good news for those who actually enjoy eating them, but not so good news for those who are tickled by dreams of wasabi or ginger ale KitKats.

Furuta Green Tea Sequoia

There's a video my husband and I shot in 1995 which we made to show our family and friends what it was like to live there at the time. I don't remember who we sent it to, but part of it includes a trek around our local shopping street (shotengai) and the shops that were on offer at the time. I recently watched that video again for the first time in a very long time and I was shocked at how few of the shops survived to 2012. In fact, I'm pretty sure that only the biggest markets (e.g., Peacock, Seiyu, etc.) made it to the present day.

One of the sites caught on camera on that video were several girls eating green tea "soft cream" (soft serve) in a tea shop. On the video, my response to the idea of green tea flavored sweets was "yuck!" At that time, the thought of bitter, grassy green tea being mixed with sugar rubbed me completely the wrong way. I think there are still plenty of Western folks out there who feel the same way.

I think green tea seems stranger as a flavoring for sweets as compared to black tea (English tea) or coffee because you don't see people putting sugar and milk in green tea, but you do find people adding them to those beverages which Western folks regard as more mainstream. Sweet coffee is common. Sweet green tea is unheard of, at least in Japan.

As time has gone by, the notion of green tea sweets has grown on me, though it still hasn't blossomed into the sort of passion that I've seen others display. I sometimes like it, and sometimes don't care for it. A lot depends on the intensity and the flavor mix. Generally, green tea plus chocolate isn't as good as green tea chocolate, if you know what I mean. That is, if it's white chocolate which has green tea flavoring, it's not as dangerous to the taste buds as milk or dark chocolate with some green tea component.

You can imagine my concern when I started to unwrap this Sequoia wafer chocolate bar and saw that the bottom was what appeared to be semi-sweet chocolate. The top is olive green (and had bloomed a bit to boot, that's the white stuff on it) and the illustration tells us that there is green tea cream between the wafers.

A sniff revealed a discordant mix of chocolate and tea aromas. A bite revealed that it was indeed semi-sweet (or bittersweet) chocolate on the bottom. This meant that there was a turf war on my tongue for which bitter flavor got to dominate, the tea's or the chocolate's. Neither one. They kicked up a lot of dirt, made a mess, and it was a draw. I really didn't care for the mixture of these two flavors. Though there is ample sweetness on hand to off-set them, it just tasted "wrong" to me.

On the best of days, Sequoia's wafer-based chocolate bars can disappoint, but this was really more unpleasant than usual from my viewpoint. I think that my reaction was an extremely subjective one. This isn't a bad bar overall, and I'm sure some people will enjoy it, but it simply was not for me. I ended up throwing the rest away after eating a little less than half.

Temple of Heaven Gunpowder Green Tea

I've heard for years that the Chinese eat all sorts of weird things, and I've known for some of those years that things like 1,000 year old eggs aren't actually as nasty as they sound. Some other things, like bird's nest soup, are even worse than they may appear. FYI, 1,000 year-old eggs are preserved for a mere 100 days, which is somewhat less gross than those ten times older. Bird's nest soup, which sounds like some sort of crunchy Euell Gibbons bark-eating extravaganza that'll keep your bowels in working order, is made with a nest that is made with saliva, which is an incredibly disgusting notion.

Keeping in mind that oddly named Chinese food is an adventure, I found it hard to walk away from this box of "special gunpowder" green tea when I found it on the shelf of a middle eastern market for a mere $1.89. The market, if anyone is interested and in the area, is in Santa Clara, CA and is called "Zad Grocery". I mention it mainly because this is a very low price for this tea compared to what I found for it via online sellers. Amazon carries it for $5.69, but I'm guessing that ethnic groceries in various areas would offer a more competitive price just as Zad Grocery did for me.

When I bought this, I didn't really believe it was going to include gunpowder. Well, I sort of felt it might be. After all, bird's nest soup does include a spit-based bird's nest. Sometimes things are what they sound like. However, before I set the tea a steepin', I investigated it to see what the deal was and it is one of those things which has a name based on appearance rather than on ingredients. The tea leaves are rolled such that they resemble gunpowder. No actual gunpowder was to be ingested. Part of me was relieved. Part was disappointed. The latter part must be some sort of suicidal streak for which I should seek some sort of psychological intervention.

As for this tea, one thing I was careful about was the steeping time. I know from experience that over-steeping green tea of any sort can render it undrinkable. While overdoing black tea (English tea) can make it bitter and involve large lashings of milk to off-set the tannin overload, it completely kills green tea if you let it soak too long. I used a timer and watched the color and it seemed that around a minute and a half worked well for my tastes. It was strong enough for some distinct flavor, but not at a funkified state. Note that I used a tea ball infuser and only about half a teaspoon of tea leaves so there was plenty of room for them to bloom as it steeped. I also swished the infuser around several times during the steeping. The water was a shade below boiling.

I usually don't make hot tea in this sort of glass, but I had to use something clear to show the color. I risked burning my hand for my dubious "art". 

Note that I read awful reviews of this on Amazon from people who claimed that there was "dirt" in the tea. My guess is that they expected it to be like Japanese green tea which is, well, green. I've had "golden" green tea from Hong Kong before and it is actually brown. This tea is also brown. That's not because it's dirty or has dirt in it, but because that's rather a natural color for certain types of tea including black teas. You'd think people would be a little less freaked out by brown tea after years of Tetley and Lipton in their cups, but I guess they took the "green tea" part literally (though I'm guessing they didn't get nearly so worked up that it wasn't a box full of gunpowder and that that was not something they took literally).

 The smell and taste of the tea reminded me strongly of oolong tea. It had just a hint of chlorophyll which moved it a notch closer to Japanese green tea, but it's such a vague whisper that I may even have imagined it. This is a very serviceable tea for those who like it straight and with a vague almost "roasted" flavor and earthy highlights. I've heard that oolong tea is made by allowing the leaves to wither on the vine a bit, and I think that is what separates it from Japanese green tea.

I wouldn't say this is the most incredible tea I have ever had, but it is tasty and suits one on a cool autumn evening or a cold winter night. I imagine it'd be just as good or possible better served cold in summer. If you can get it economically, as I did, it's absolutely worth a try. I'm not sure I'd pay more for it than oolong tea, but I wouldn't mind always having a box around for when the mood strikes me, and I'm guessing drinking it may have some health benefits as well. Besides, having a box of it on your shelf is sure to be a conversation starter for those evenings when you're entertaining boring guests or relatives.

Look Green Tea Dessert Chocolate

Occasionally, I like to get off my lazy behind and act like I'm a journalist rather than a slacktacular blogger. To that end, I tried to track down why "LOOK" chocolate carries its particular moniker. Sometimes, there really isn't a reason for a product to have an English name. More often than not, I simply can't find it.

I did discover that the box and logo were originally designed by a famous French-born industrial designer named Raymond Loewy. He emphasized simplicity, hence the "look" of "LOOK". I also learned that the first incarnation of LOOK included coffee, strawberry, banana, and caramel flavors. I guess that rules out each letter of the name representing a flavor in the box (or it'd be named CSBC). If any reader knows why these are called LOOK, please clue me in.

I found these near the check-out counter at Nijiya market. I think it cost around $2.00 (156 yen), which is actually a very reasonable price considering these tended to cost 100 yen in Japan ($1.27). You can get them for nearly the same price that I paid via the Asian Food Grocer. Though at the time that I wrote this post, they were out of stock, my guess is that they will get them back in or at least you can inquire about availability.

You may guess that the brown one on the right is the red bean version.

The matcha parfait smells only of chocolate, but when you slip it into your mouth and allow the softish chocolate to melt, it reveals both creamy notes and a nicely sweetened green tea flavor. I've said before that I'm relatively ambivalent about green tea. I've craved it more since leaving Japan, but it's not something I'm over the moon about. I believe that this is definitely an accessible green tea chocolate for those in my position and I really enjoyed the subtle but present matcha notes coupled with a rich, creamy sense.

The matcha adzuki is even more impressive in regards to the depth of flavor. It hits chocolate, red bean, and green tea notes with the tea coming in "last" in the flavor profile and the others holding their own on equal footing. It manages to insert an anko (red bean pastes) flavor without seeming a bit too earthy or gamey (as is sometimes the case with such sweets, like some of the red bean KitKats).

I liked both of these flavors a lot and was really happy to have bought this. LOOK is a chocolate I tended to, well, overlook (no pun intended, but it is duly noted) when I was in Japan. It wasn't as glamorous and often I just felt that the flavor combinations held too many options that didn't seem varied enough or had varieties that I did not like. If you're looking for something approachable to introduce people to green tea sweets, this might work. If you already like them, this might not be bitter enough for you. If you're like me, then you're going to enjoy this.

Furuta Green Tea Sand Cookies

Shortly before I returned to the United States, the Oreo cookie, perhaps the world's most famous sandwich cookie, turned 100 years old. The concept of two cookies with some sort of sweet filling between them likely pre-dates the venerable Oreo by centuries as it seems natural for someone to see a couple of plain cookies and think about how it might be interesting to put some honey, jam, cream, butter, or other sweet filling between them. However, the processed packaged sort of sandwich cookie is a product of our modern age and bless the person who invented them. I haven't found even a bad sandwich cookie that I hated, though I've certainly had a few that I didn't exactly love.

As I've mentioned before, having grown up poor, I never ate Oreos. We had store brand cookies. You know, the sort that you used to buy in industrial sized packages for about a dollar. Each plastic package had enough empty calories to keep you energized but malnourished for weeks. Of course, my mother didn't buy those cookies all that often because, you know, poor folks back in my day didn't do that too often. We were too busy poaching deer so we'd have meat for awhile or stealing a Christmas tree from the distant areas of some poor sap's farm. 

At any rate, I love sandwich cookies, but I rarely buy packages of them for one big reason. They are almost always calorie-dense. My husband and I bought some peanut butter Oreos when we were still on the San Juan islands because Japan doesn't sell peanut butter and chocolate sweets and the idea was so marvelously American that we had to indulge. Unfortunately, the package, which was a "regular" one, took us a little over a month to consume. Both of us are still a little taken aback by the way in which it's hard to buy very small portions outside of convenience stores and their supposed "snack packs". When I checked the nutrition information, I noted that each peanut butter Oreo was a whopping 71 calories. For that price, I could enjoy three vanilla meringue cookies or an entire piece of most types of fruit. 

Still, sometimes, you have to spoil yourself (as Ned Flanders says), and you have a craving for a sandwich cookie with its crispy outer planks and creamy inner filling. And sometimes, you've lived in Japan for a long time and are "homesick" for its flavors and decide that green tea sounds pretty damn good right now. Such was the case for me when I found these at the Daiso Japan for a $1.50 (120 yen). The box contains 10 somewhat largish (a bit bigger than an Oreo) sandwich cookies and they come with the bargain calorie count of 51 calories each. They're also fortified with Calcium and that may provide you with some comfort if you're the sort of person who feels the need to nutritionally justify your junk food consumption (I'm not). 

Most people feel that the sandwich cookie succeeds or fails on the cream filling, but I'm actually more about the quality of the outer cookies. Sure, the cream is important, but if the cookie is bad, that makes the filling irrelevant. It's like a good cup of coffee. It doesn't matter how great the cream you use is. If the brew is not good, the experience is ruined.

Fortunately, the cookie exterior on this is very nice. It has a nice snap with the right amount of fat-induced flakiness. It either has a good carmelized sugar flavor or is made with brown sugar because it definitely has that sort of edge to it. The ingredients do not specify anything other than "sugar". It probably helps that they are made, at least in part, with whole wheat flour and their is a small hint of earthiness rather than the flat blandness of white flour.

The filling is a bit scarce, but that's okay because it carries just the right balance of green tea bitterness with some sugary sweetness. The only thing which could be better is some more textural decadence with more fatty interior, but I'm not complaining. These are solid cookies on every front, though they absolutely don't carry the sort of over-the-top sweetness that Oreo cookies do. The best thing about that is that there is nice flavor depth. You can taste the cookie's quality's as well as the filling. I'd definitely buy these again. Though I can't say I'd want to keep them on hand at all times, I'm not sure I can say that of most of the things I enjoy. If you're a green tea fan, they're absolutely worth a visit.

Note: If you can't access these any other way, I found them online at a place called eFood Depot for $3.95 a box. They're a little expensive there, but for those determined to try them (especially serious green tea lovers), they're likely worth the price. 

Celestial Seasonings Authentic Green Tea

Several years ago, I had a conversation with one of my friends in California in which he told me that he preferred to drink green tea rather than other sorts of beverages. Though he has since moved on to the more manly choice of coffee (though he still puts milk in it like a little girl), he was happy at that point in time when I said I wanted to send him a teapot and some authentic green tea from Japan. While he liked the tea pot, he was puzzled by the bag of what appeared to be grass clippings that I sent him. The green tea that I experienced in Japan was nothing like what he was quaffing in America.

One of the ways in which the green tea he drank was different was that it wasn't really, truly green. This was a fact that he didn't relay to me until I'd sent him a bag of green tea leaves that was, well, very green. That's not to say that all of the green tea that is sold in America is not green, but just the variety he was having. However, when something sells its green tea as "authentic", I expect it to be like what I had in Japan. In the case of Celestial Seasonings Authentic Green Tea (with white tea for smooth taste)", that was not quite the case.

I guess part of the issue is that I'm not sure what makes anything "authentic". In my fevered imagination, I believe it means that it is like the original and in my bias toward Japan being the center of all things green tea, I thought that meant it should be like Japanese traditional tea. That is, it should be green and have a more than faint taste like chlorophyll. It turns out that, like many things in Japan (like "Japanese cheesecake", "Japanese bread", etc.), the origin of green tea and the truly authentic version is hardly like the Japanese one at all. Green tea originated in China and this may actually be more authentic than the green tea I had in Japan because it is akin to Chinese green tea.

I don't brew or serve my tea out of drinking glasses, but I don't have on of those cool-looking clear Captain Picard tea cups with the metal bands. ThinkGeek sells them, but I don't have one because I'm still a homeless person and have no place for cups.

When I brewed up a cup of this, I was surprised to see that it is closer to gold and that a bit of oil floats on top of it. The oils are more akin to what you sometimes see when brewing coffee. It also does not smell very grassy and it tastes a a bit like a blend of oolong tea and what I drank as green tea in Japan. It has a deeper, earthier taste rather than a profoundly grassy one. The truth is that, not being an ardent fan of Japanese green tea, I rather liked this better than what I had previously conceived of as "authentic" green tea. I liked it a lot more, and it has a cool dragon graphic on the front of the box as an added bonus.

You can get Celestial Seasonings teas at nearly any supermarket in the United States. I could actually buy them at markets in Tokyo as well, though the variety of flavors was limited and I never saw this green tea for sale there. I guess it would be just as confusing for the Japanese to buy this and see how it differed from their version of green tea as it was for me. If you can't find it anywhere else and want to try it, you can find it at Amazon. It's mellow and well-balanced and requires no sweetener or milk to make it enjoyable, though I'm guessing you could probably find bags of bulk oolong and green tea and mix up you own blend and it which would be similar and cheaper than this. However, I think they'd also taste a bit harsher and have a less spiffy graphic on the box. 

Kanro Green Tea Candy

I once read a book called "Turning Japanese" by a nisei, a young man born of Japanese parents in the United States. He had been raised entirely in America and culturally, aside from the influence of his family, he was American. I read the book quite some time ago, but I recall that I didn't like it. I recall that he visited Japan at one point and reached a lot of odd conclusions about how he was actually Japanese based on a lot of superficial and tenuous links. Among the few things I remember was that he didn't like to drink a lot at once and that he learned/concluded/speculated/guessed that Japanese people had small bladders and didn't like to drink a lot either. My feeling about that is that he clearly has never been to a "nomikai" or "drinking party" in which businessmen can imbibe copious amounts of fluids regardless of their supposedly teeny tiny bladders and long-suffering livers.

This fellow was hardly the only person who felt he was "turning Japanese" from just spending some time hobnobbing with the locals, and at least he had a family cultural heritage and bloodline to back up his claims (though, as an American, I don't believe blood determines ethnicity, but rather culture... this is my particular bias). I've known more than enough lily white foreigner who felt he or she was "turning Japanese". One of my former coworkers, a British woman, came here with a head full of voluminously curly brown hair and an eclectic wardrobe. She left here with black, straight hair and the same sort of muted, boring wardrobe that you see in autumn in Tokyo. Another claims that all things Japanese are superior to all things back in her home country, or at least she did up until Fukushima when all of her faith in Japanese society crumbled with the nuclear reactors' external housing.

One of the reasons I spent a lot of my early years in Japan actively rejecting anything that was "too Japanese" was that I felt people who were clearly not of this culture pretending they could somehow be of it was foolish and, frankly, embarrassing. Let's face it, this is not an inclusive culture and the only person you fool is yourself if you believe assimilation is possible. It was a huge turn-off for me when people "went native" and lost all perspective about the yin and yang of life in all cultures. Unfortunately, my distaste for such people manifested in distaste for the things they attached themselves to and it wasn't until I started blogging about life in Japan and doing this food blog in particular that I started to more fully open up and embrace what was on offer. Beans in my sweets? Stretchy rice cake? Green tea sweets? No thank you.

Well, I've grown up a bit and I adore beans in my sweets now and have turned into a real mochi aficionado. However, I still have not strongly taken to green tea treats. If I'm served a cup of green tea with a meal set, I'll drink it. I'll even drink the cup my husband is served, too, but I won't order one or pay extra for it. If I'm given a green tea-flavored cake by a student, I'll eat it and probably enjoy it to some extent, but I won't buy it myself. With this in mind, no one was more surprised than me to find that I had a craving for something green tea flavored and found myself purchasing these Kanro green tea hard candies. I don't know what came over me. Perhaps I grew up just a little bit more in my final month in Japan or I just am so bored with the usual options that I was ready for something "new".

I found these for about 150 yen at Okashi no Machioka discount snack shop. Each sugarless candy is a nice shiny green pellet and only about 11 calories. There are two varieties. One has milk in it and the other is pretty much the "straight" green tea (matcha) version. The milk one is less bitter and mellow. The darker one carries much more of the usual straightforward bitterness of tea as you drink it from a cup, albeit with sweetness. Both of these have a rounder flavor and texture than conventional hard candies and are super smooth on the tongue. Though they are sugarless, they include margarine (yes, margarine) as an ingredient as well as cream, and I believe the added fat adds to the smooth, slightly rich feeling in your mouth.

When I consumed one of these on the way home from work, my husband got a funny look on his face and asked what I had in my mouth. I told him it was a green tea candy to which he tactfully replied that something smelled "funky". That was his nice way of saying that he really didn't care much for the stink of the candy. That means that I'm far less likely to buy these again. However, if I really loved them, I would keep buying them and eat them when he's not around. There are other things I love that he finds the scent of unpleasant that I buy and eat anyway (like sembei), but the bar is raised if he finds it nasty to be around, especially if it inhibits talking or kissing. Personally, I think these are pretty nice for green tea candies and if I developed another inexplicable desire for a green tea sweet, I might even buy them again. I imagine a true green tea fan would find them quite enjoyable, but I think this will be my last bag. I guess that I'm really not "turning Japanese" as they aren't quite suited to my tastes.

Starbucks Azuki Matcha Latte

One of the things that Japan used to be famous for was copious numbers of free samples. There was a time, in days gone by, that foreigners would remark that a trip through the food areas of a department store (the basement) would net you so many samples that you could get a free lunch. I'm here to say that those days are long, long gone. Samples are offered on occasion, but the only places that reliably pony them up are Costco and some of the posher traditional rice cracker (sembei) and sweets shops. Such shops still serve a cup of tea and a small sample in many cases, but things are far spottier in markets, bakeries and department stores.

Since most customers descend on open trays and baskets of free samples as if they were living in the midst of post-war famine, I can understand why various places have cut way back on offering them. Few customers tend to actually make purchases based on such samples anyway. In fact, one enduring frustration for my husband and I is that there are some things (especially in bakeries) that look good and if samples could be had, we might buy them. I don't blame the bakeries, but rather the greedy customers. Honestly, I've seen people hover over sample baskets trying to block other people's access while they feed themselves with two fists. I'm not talking about grubby homeless people or impoverished students (I'm not sure Japan actually has any poor college students), but middle-aged women in nice clothes with shopping bags bearing the names of tony shops.

My most recent experience with free samples came along this very day while I was hanging out in a local Starbucks waiting for my husband to finish a swim and rejoin me for a convivial walk home. I rarely sit in coffee shops because I'd rather walk about. However, with my recent surgery (on Dec. 20), I really felt too tired to spend an hour walking while he swam. Before half my thyroid was extracted and I attained a big piratey scar across my throat, I would have happily gotten some extra exercise instead of occupying space for the price of an expensive cup of coffee. As I sat there reading a medieval novel on my ancient Palm, one of the Starbucks employees walked over with a tray of samples and told me it was something for New Year's, but she said it so fast that I only caught the word "matcha" (green tea). Looking at it, I knew that it was a latte by the color, but I didn't know what the little brown swirl on the top was. It turned out that it was azuki (sweetened red bean) sauce. Frankly, I thought it might be chocolate syrup.

I'm not a huge fan of green tea. It's in the category of "if they serve it to me for free, I'll drink it, but I won't order it myself". I've tried a lot of green-tea flavored things including KitKats, cookies, cakes, bean cakes, ice cream, and actual tea, of course. On occasion, I've really enjoyed it because the right balance of bitter and sweet can really create something tremendous with green tea. At other times, I've felt far too much bitter or grassiness in the mix and that the green tea element was overbearing. To my taste buds, green tea flavoring is like coffee flavoring. It's easy to get wrong, and hard to get right.

This is how I remember my experiences when I'm out of the apartment and forgot to put my notebook back in my bag. Thank goodness for all of the advertising tucked into free packets of pocket tissues.

I sniffed the sample with interest and noted that the scent had some nutty elements as well as the familiar green tea scent. The taste was milky with a strong green tea flavor, but nearly zero bitterness. The creamy full fat milk and enough sugar to make it sweet but nowhere near cloying offset any unpleasantness that may have come from using such a strong green tea flavor. The azuki, which I perceived as chocolate based on the color and appearance, was too small in quantity to really add much, but it may have added a dimension that wasn't overtly "beany". It may have just added rather more depth of flavor. In fact, one thing that I really liked about this was that drinking it was such a multilayered experience. The texture was creamy, but not overly rich and the flavor was strong, but not overbearing. The manner in which the latte was made or the tea roasted left me with a good nutty finish.

I really liked this, and would actually buy one for myself now that I've tried it. Considering my relative indifference to green tea, that says a lot about how good it is and the power of offering free samples. I'm not sure how matcha purists would feel about this, but I thought it was truly delicious. That being said, don't be fooled into thinking the fact that this is green tea with red beans makes it healthy. If you drink one, you are essentially having dessert as a short one with regular milk has 180 calories, a tall about 300, and a venti nearly 400 calories. Since this is likely to disappear after the season is well and truly over, I'd recommend skipping dessert one day soon and enjoying one while you can.

Tirol Soy Green Tea Latte Chocolate

I've been avoiding the little squares of Tirol chocolates for awhile now. Part of the reason for this is that the flavors have been in re-runs for some time, and unappealing ones at that. Another reason is that what has been on offer hasn't really sparked a fire under my ass. That being said, I'm not sure why I don't blithely just buy every single flavor and review it because each little 1-inch (2.5 cm.) candy is only 20 yen (about 24 cents). I have little to lose except the time it takes to whine about the sub-par ones.

It's that sort of reckless spending that brings this green tea chocolate to my dear readers today. I'm not a huge fan of green tea, but, hey, 20 yen. I found this at 7-11, but you can get them at any convenience store at the moment. This has 60 calories, which is a little higher than usual for these chocolates. I'm guessing that has something to do with how much sugar is packed into its white chocolate base. The initial hit of flavor is intensely sweet, but is chased by green tea bitterness.

The "latte" part of this is supposed to be the white chocolate center. I'm guessing that is where most of the intense sweetness comes from. The bitterness comes from the green part that serves as a bread to this little candy sandwich. The center is a chewy little gummi which lends texture rather than flavor. Perhaps it's supposed to be the "soy" portion, but honestly, I detect no soy flavor at all. It doesn't do anything at all for this besides stop it from being even sweeter and fattier.

If you're a green tea fan, I think you might really enjoy this. The green tea flavor comes across quite well and is well balanced by the sweet white chocolate. If you're sensitive to white chocolate, this still may be a bit much for you. All in all, I want to give this a happy rating because I thought it was good for a green tea chocolate, but I know I'll never buy another one again. So, this is a conditional "indifferent" rating. I thought this was enjoyable, but just not my kind of thing.