Natori Fish Almond Mix

There are a lot of disgusting looking dried up seafood snacks in Japan which I have always sworn I would not touch with the proverbial 10-foot pole... then I started doing this blog and got the bright idea of doing reviews of the weirder things which I have shied away from. I figured that I could stretch my palate a little and push the boundaries of what I'll eat, at least a little.

While perusing all of the odder looking bits, I considered the leathery bits of octopus and the stringy bits of eel. Knowing I don't like those types of seafood at all convinced me that trying them would be a pointless exercise in handing out "very unhappy" ratings. I decided that I would try the omnipresent dried fish snacks because, though I'm not a fan of fish, I don't hate it. At the very least, it might be "so-so", and this version with almonds might go down a bit more easily because they're my favorite nut.

You can find dried fish snacks nearly everywhere in Japan. They are particularly popular as otsumami or snacks marketed to be consumed with beverages (and alcoholic ones in particular). I got this at Lawson 100 shop for 100 yen ($1.17). It's a 24 gram (.85 oz.) bag and the entire thing has 126 calories and 9.3 grams of protein. These are pretty healthy, and I was once told by a student that this was the only snack she was allowed to eat as a child because she had bad teeth and her mother didn't want her eating anything with sugar. 

I was all fine on an intellectual level to try these for review, and then I poured them onto a tissue to take a picture before eating. Seeing the little heads that had broken free, and the bits of internal organs through their dried out transparent bodies started to really turn my stomach. It's not eating fish that is the problem so much as eating every little bit of the fish. I had some serious second thoughts about my choice. At least the squid cheese strings don't look like squid, and the dried out octopus bits are chopped up and don't have eyes and veins. I was really regretting this choice.

I didn't even want to touch them, but I rounded up a few fish and a few almonds, closed my eyes, and put them in my mouth. Unsurprisingly, it tasted super fishy with only the slightest hint of almond. They aren't very salty, but there was a hint of sweetness. This is no surprise since the third ingredient is actually sugar (the first is almonds, and the second, sardines or "iwashi"/いわし). There are also sesame seeds studding the little dried up corpses, but the fish taste is so overpowering that the seeds and nuts flavors are largely drowned out.

This wasn't horrible, but it wasn't great. If I were starving to death and had to eat these, it wouldn't be the end of the world, but I can't see enjoying it casually as a snack or craving it. It is intensely fishy, and there is something peculiar about sugar and fish as a combination. I'll admit that I took one bite and threw the rest away, but that's mostly because looking at them made me queasy. I could have forced down the rest, but I saw no reason to do so.

If you'd like to share your experiences with weird foods and enter a contest for a chance to win a silly prize, please read this post and make a comment.

Glico Cheeza Cheddar Cheese Crackers

Cheeza brand crackers have been around for ages, and I have largely resisted them based on one point - price. They cost 168 yen ($1.78) for a one serving bag. When I see Cratz's salty pretzel goodness sitting right next to Cheeza in the otsumami (snacks to be eaten while drinking alcohol) section for a mere 100-120 yen ($1.06-$1.27), I'll just snap up the yummy Cratz. As fate would have it, Cheeza went on sale for about 130 yen ($1.40) and I decided to give in and give them a try for this week of cheese-based snacks reviews.

One of the promotional points for Cheeza's crackers is the fact that they are 52% cheese. I didn't really trust that the high amount of cheese as an ingredient was going to be reflected in the crackers themselves.

That being said, they look very encouraging with their orange color. The design of the crackers is quite cute and looks like it would satisfy any discriminating mouse. Each is very thin and super crispy. The saltiness mainly comes from the cheese rather than added salt. The cheddar cheese flavor is pleasantly strong, and you can really tell a lot of cheese went into the dough both by the look and flavor. Note that the first ingredient isn't "cheddar cheese", but "cheddar cheese powder, followed by Trehalose. That sounds bad, but these taste good.

Each bag is 38 grams (1.34 oz.) and the entire contents are pictured in the picture above. It's actually a healthy amount of crackers for 199 calories. Though I'm still not happy about the price for such a small portion, I really enjoyed these and felt that they were the closest I'm going to come in Japan to the flavor of Cheez-Its. Frankly, I think these are actually better than Cheez-Its (which I love), and I'd recommend them for any fan of cheesy salted snacks.

Bacon Pepper Cratz

Glico's Cratz site has a big glass of beer on it next to the three flavors of Cratz that are currently available. However, if you click through, you'll see that they're not fussy about what you drink with their "otsumami" (snacks to be enjoyed with alcohol). You can also eat your Cratz with wine, sake, liquer, brandy or "spirits". They fill you in on all of the options that might go hand and hand with getting loaded and filling up on spicy pretzels.

One thing they don't include on the site is soft drinks. I guess that Cratz, with it's strong flavors, manly chunks of pretzel, high protein nuts and bold logo, is not designed for sissies who can't knock back some booze. I may be a sissy who doesn't drink alcohol, but I do enjoy Cratz with Diet Coke on occasion. At 220 calories for 44 grams (1.5 oz.), they're pretty fattening though so I don't tend to have a bag more than once every month or so.


The bacon pepper pretzels smell like bacon and ham and, like the other varieties of Cratz, are super crunchy and dense, but easy to bite into. The flavor is salty and they have the flavor of lightly cured bacon (more ham than bacon) with a mild peppery finish. The spiciness is very mixed due to the various added flavors. The ingredients include chicken powder, tomato paste, vegetable paste, pork extract powder, and bacon extract.

There seem to be no failures in the Cratz flavor line. Among all three of the current flavors, I'd say that Spicy Cheese is my favorite, but I'd happily take any of them if I was in the mood for pretzels. I'll definitely buy these again some time.

Kaki No Tane ("Persimmon Seeds" Sembei) with Peanuts

This is another one of those snacks that I have seen for years in Japan and never bothered to buy. A big reason for this is that most of the time kaki no tane (kaki = persimmon, no = of, tane = seed) is sold in fairly large quantities. I'm sure there are small packs around, but I just never went out of my way to find them. This is the sort of snack that people buy for their families to nosh on, perhaps while watching television.

There are many companies that produce these. Mine just happened to be made by a company with no on-line profile named Sweet Box, Inc. (株式会社スイートボックス). I found this at the 99 yen shop and figured that this was a relatively small bag and cheap so it was past time to try this well-known and oft-enjoyed savory snack. These are frequently eaten with beer or other alcoholic beverages and are part of the category of snacks to be eaten with alcohol called otsumami.


The bag is 150 grams and contains 6 packets. Each packet is 120 calories. There are generous amounts of peanuts in each bag and that's what you smell when you open a packet. The sembei doesn't really carry much of a scent.


The little slivers of sembei are slick and shiny. They taste like plain sembei, but carry some heat. The heat isn't present on the first bite, but comes cumulatively and as an aftertaste. The peanuts are blanched so they just carry a nice peanut flavor with no heavy roasted or burnt flavors. The sembei is quite crispy and the entire mix isn't salted. The ingredients include peanuts, rice, starch, soy sauce, sugar, dried bonito extract, hydrolyzed protein, salt, sea tangle extract, seasoning, sorbitol, paprika color, caramel color, and spices extract. I'm guessing their savory nature comes from the soy sauce mainly, but also whatever spices are in the final extract.

These are very good, even for someone who isn't mad about sembei like me. I love the mix of the peanuts with the crispy and very mildly hot little pieces of sembei. Even though this was a very cheap brand made by a no name company, it seems very well-made and fresh tasting. This is a snack I'll definitely pick up again some time, particularly at 16 yen per serving.

Spicy Cheese Cratz

One of the things that you often see on Japanese food is a claim that a particular food is from another country or prepared in the style of another country's cuisine. I can't tell you how many times I've seen something say "American" which was in no way American. Many of those items also sport American flag motifs.

One of the strangest claims of origin I ever saw said that a particular brand of spicy chips was "Ethnican flavor." I don't know where those Ethnicans are located on the globe, but I salute them and their cuisine, wherever they may be. On this package of Cratz, is says "German style pretzels", but I have no idea if they are actually in any way German, though they are thick and bready like you'd expect a Bavarian-style pretzel to be.


Like the previously reviewed chicken and Alpen salt flavor of Cratz, these are very flavorful pretzels with a few almonds tossed in for good measure. I counted and there were about 5 almonds in the 144 gram (1.5 oz.) bag. They smell taste cheesy, but also carry a spicy heat as part of the finishing taste. The spiciness comes from a plethora of powders and pastes including onion powder, green onion powder, paprika, chicken extract powder, 2 types of cheese powder, vegetable powder, and tomato paste. The texture is super crunchy without being too hard.

I could eat these everyday, but I won't because they're not exactly great for you and I have a whole country's worth of junk to review. They may have too much of a hot bite for some people, but they suit my tastes quite well. The only problem is that the small portion carries a heavy load of calories at 222 calories and it's easy to put away the whole bag in no time.

Cratz Alpen Salt & Chicken

It's interesting how many products in Japan contain invented words which are a merger of two English words. My guess is that Cratz is a combination of "pretzel" and "cracker", though I guess it may possibly relate to "nutz", but that'd be a stretch. Honestly though, the name sounds like the consequence of some sort of unfortunate intestinal disorder. "I ate too many prunes and had a bad case of Cratz".

Now that I've no doubt destroyed all interest in actually consuming Cratz, let me tell you that they're quite flavorful. In fact, after sampling the rather bland cheddar Pretz, Cratz are a pleasant surprise. The chicken flavor is very present and not in a chicken buillion cube way. One of the ingredients is "fried chicken powder" and that stuff really conveys the right chicken flavor. It's more like chowing down on actual chicken flavor-wise. There's a hint of pepper and, of course, salt. Even though "Alpen salt" is a part of the flavor, these are not overly salty. The salt quantity is perfect.


While Cratz are a much better pretzel-based otsumami (snacks to be consumed with alcohol) than Pretz, there is a price to be paid for all that goodness. A 44 gram bag (1.55 oz.) has 220 calories. Part of this is the almonds which no doubt carry heavy fat-based calories, but the pretzels themselves are heavy and dense. When you chew them for awhile, they start to reveal a rather "bread-like" finishing taste which is reminiscent of the experience of eating soft pretzels back home.

Cratz are a little expensive for the quantity you get and tend to be sold right next to cans of beer, making their relationship clear. I bought this package for 99 yen ($1.00), but it was on sale. Usually, the price is closer to 160 yen ($1.64). If you favor a bolder flavor and want to get a small amount of protein with your pretzels, it's definitely worth the extra yen to pony up for a small bag of Cratz.

This is also reviewed on The Japanese Snack Food Review.

Cheddar Pretz

There is a whole category of snacks in Japan that are marketed as accompaniments to alcohol. Since this is a country where alcohol is an important social lubricant that allows stoic salary men to let loose on a regular basis, one can say that alcohol operates as a socially sanctioned therapist opening cathartic floodgates and letting the tension pour out.

These types of snacks to accompany alcohol are called "otsumami" in Japanese. They range from little whole dehydrated fish to strips of squid to chips and pretzels. I've seen the scarier bits hanging in convenience stores and liquor shops for years, but am not brave enough to chow down on dried fish as they stare back at me with their dead eyes. Pretzels, on the other hand, can hardly be offensive.


Pretz are just pretzel sticks presented plain or with flavoring. I'd say they were a savory rip-off of Pocky, but they're both made by the same company so it's not exactly theft. Also, this is a pretzel stick. It's a pretty basic concept that cannot be claimed as original to any particular company. This particular variety of Pretz has 6% cheddar cheese in it and I'm going to say that that's not nearly enough. When you open one of the two foil packets in the box, you smell a fairly strong cheesy flavor, but the smell doesn't translate into much cheese taste. They're also not incredibly salty.

All in all, they're not a bad pretzel experience, but not a spectacular one. The back of the box makes mention of the fact that there is pepper on them, but there is very little and it doesn't make much of a difference in taste. There is also Sucralose in these. In fact, there seems to be a lot of artificial sweetener in Japanese snacks for reasons I can't understand.

Japanese-made pretzels are no different than Western-made ones. They just cost a little more, are lighter in color, come in smaller portions and have less salt. Each box comes with two 31-gram (1 oz.) foil packets that will set you back 139 calories. If you're hot for some pretzels, these will do you fine, but don't expect any serious cheesy goodness to come along with them. I guess if you're getting potted and blowing off steam about the boss, you're probably not all that concerned about how much serious cheddar flavor you're going to get on your nosh.