Kracie Man Banana

Doing a rough translation of the name of the this product, which literally is "man banana" (男バナナ), I realize there is an unintentional implication there. If you're expecting something remotely phallic, you're in for an incredibly big disappointment. I think that a better translation would be "banana man", but where's the fun in that?

This product seems to have been inspired by the episode of The Simpsons in which Homer decides to get in shape and climb "The Murderhorn". While he's getting in shape, he tells his wife, Marge, that he will only eat food in bar form in order to release its awesome power so he takes two pounds of spaghetti and compresses it into a bar which he eats and then calls the hospital. This candy is trying to release the awesomeness of bananas, raisins, and mangoes by compressing them into little 30-calorie cubes of chewy candy.

My husband found this candy at NewDays convenience store and was drawn to the banana aspect of it. If it weren't for him, I wouldn't be reviewing this since I'm not a big fan of banana snacks. That being said, he ate one piece of this and then never went back for more. To him, it tasted like nothing more than hyper-concentrated banana. This is no surprise since it is 90% fruit. A sniff tells you that banana is definitely the main component, but I could also taste the raisin's telltale sweetness and strong over-ripened flavor.

This candy is not your typical soft chew. It's rather more like a block of dried fruit/fruit leather. It's a little difficult to bite off a bit, but not exactly tough. Because it doesn't have much except fruit, dextrin and gelatin, you can get some idea of what it might be like to eat.

This reminded me a bit of eating banana chips without the added sweetness or crunchiness. It wasn't bad, but I am not the biggest fan of dried fruit flavors. To me, a lot of the value of fruit is in its moist real textures, not in hyper-concentrating those flavors by drying them out and squashing them. Though this isn't bad, I can't help but give it an "unhappy" rating because neither my husband nor I will eat the remaining 4 pieces of the 6 piece pack. Fans of dried fruit may feel otherwise, but I would really rather eat an actual banana than eat something like this.

Hokunyu Fruity Tomato Yogurt

When I was a kid, I loved tomatoes so much that I'd eat one like an apple. I'm guessing that back then they were better tasting tomatoes than they are these days, but I still eat raw tomato several times a week, if not everyday depending on how the prices are looking. 

I mentioned in some previous posts that tomato seems to be a fad food in Japan at present and you'd think I'd be happy about that, but the Japanese can take something as pure and fabulous as a tomato and pervert it into something bizarre and disturbing. There are tomato gelatin desserts, candies, and caramels. The caramels are an especially scary concept as they are packaged and presented like these Kabaya caramels that I reviewed previously. 

I think that there was potential for this to be good depending on how things came together. Plain yogurt, especially Greek yogurt or yogurt cheese, could go decently with tomato. It's not out of the realm of possibility that this would be nice. Well, it isn't!

When I peeled off the foil and gave it a sniff, it smelled like regular yogurt. The texture is quite firm and betrays the presence of gelatin to thicken it. Among the other ingredients are tomato puree (12%), orange juice, and sugar. The taste is like a strange combination of sweetened yogurt with a tomato aftertaste. I ate the entire container which afforded me 78 calories of energy and little else besides this review.

The main problem is that this is just a freaky mix of flavors, especially with the strong tomato puree aftertaste. It's like mixing yogurt, sugar, and tomato paste together and this tastes as good as that sounds. The company that makes this sells other dairy products including a few of types of pudding which are supposed to be like a famous cheesecake and chocolate cake maker named Tops. I've had Tops cakes before and they are delicious. I hope that Hokunyu does them better justice than they did this unholy marriage of tomato paste, sugar, and sour dairy.

Yotchan Tiger Brothers Plums

One of my students told me a story awhile ago about a friend of hers. When the friend was a child, she wanted to have some more "umeboshi" at dinner. Umeboshi, or pickled plums, are like pickled green olives back home. They're small and salty and are generally eaten in small quantities. Her mother didn't want her to have more because they have so much sodium and too many are bad for your health.

My students friend had a bout of night eating on the evening that her mother said no to her umeboshi desires. She sleep-walked to the kitchen and ate an entire jar of them. Her mother took her to the hospital the next day because she was afraid all of that salt might kill her. She was given fluids and lived, and her mother decided not to deny her second and third helpings on the pickled plums anymore.

One wouldn't think something which is equivalent to an olive would be something kids would go for, but I found this pack of 3 pickled plums in the kid's snacks section. It was next to the marble choco and curry corn snacks. This pack was 21 yen (25 cents) and is made by a company called "Yotchan". They make a lot of very cheap kid's snacks that could be included in these two weeks of weird because most of it is gnarled seaweed, plum, and various bits of contorted, dried out bits wrapped in plastic. Note that these pickled plums are dyed and the company also sells a version which is grayer and less colorful which are not visually enhanced.

Since I've been in Japan for a long time, and I've been in my share of restaurants, I've had umeboshi before. The truth is that I rather like the ones I've had. They're sour and sometimes mushy and somethings a quite firm (almost hard). They have a distinctive smell which is hard to relate to anything one has experienced back home. It's mainly a combination of the plum scent and a quasi-vinegary smell, but these are not made with vinegar.

These pickled plums are the firm type, and they have a pit inside of them. They're very hard, like an unripened peach. They're sour and salty like most umeboshi, but they also have a weird sweetness to them which I haven't encountered in these before. One of the ingredients is Stevia, and I really don't think it's doing anything for these.

Even though I like umeboshi, I didn't like these because of that strange sweetness. I'm also more of a fan of the softer pickled plums than the hard ones, though I generally find the harder ones okay as well. I wouldn't buy these again, and I don't plan to eat the rest of them.

If you're interested in some desktop wallpapers with Yotchan's mascot, you can download some here.

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. 

Karinto

Karinto is a traditonal snack in Japan which is deep fried and coated in brown sugar.  Other flavors are also available, but the type you see most often, which resembles something you'd find floating in an unflushed toilet, are these brown sugar varieties. You can find karinto sold pretty much anywhere for a low price. I found mine at Okashi no Machioka discount snack shop in their 100 yen ($1.19) snacks area. This is a pretty typical price for karinto. The manufacturers vary, but most of them are not big companies, have no web sites and use relatively generic packaging, as was the case with the maker of my version.

This is a quintessential example of Japanese junk food as it is essentially a type of fried doughnut-style batter loaded with fat and sugar. These are not a low calorie traditional Japanese snack by any stretch of the imagination. Each piece is approximately 13 calories and is 6 cm long (2.4 in.) and just under 1 cm (.4 in.) wide. The entire 125 gram (4.4 oz.) bag is a whopping 591 calories. The first ingredients are brown sugar, sugar, and then flour.

They smell like a slightly burnt brown sugar donut with some unexpected ingredient which you can't put your finger on. They taste like a deep fried corn snack, like a Cheeto, with brown sugar saturating it at every level. There is a strong flavor of oil and an aftertaste of pure brown sugar. There is also a modest burnt sugar flavor going on.

Though not horrible, there was something about these which hit me as very, very wrong. My guess is it was the oiliness of them and the very sugary nature coupled with the corn snack style texture which I think results from them being a bit like a very dried out doughnut. They had a strong taste of having been fried in oil that had been used a lot and being saturated with oil. The texture was both soft and hard at the same time. I guess that is because they are deep fried, but sugary.

I don't believe that anyone who tries these will hate them, but I'm not sure that they'll love them either. There is a real sense of disharmony to karinto for me in which the elements are all fine or inoffensive, but they come together in a package which doesn't seem right. I also feel like they are really, really poor on the calorie cost to food pleasure ratios, and I almost certainly won't finish the bag and definitely won't buy them again.

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. 

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.

Meito Strawberry Sarasara Kakigori

"Sarasara is a Japanese onomatopoeia which indicates the sound of water or sand moving smoothly (or it can also mean "squeaky clean"). In this case, I'm guessing it is used to indicate that the little ice granules will move smoothly over each other rather than stick together in icy clumps.

When the heat starts around May until it ceases somewhere in, oh, October, the number of frozen treats starts to swell. While mass market kakigori (shaved ice with syrup) cups are available year-round in select areas, the variety greatly increases during the hotter months. Fortunately for  makers of icy confections, it's hot for quite awhile in Tokyo. For someone like me who is sensitive to heat, no amount of ice cream, ice milk, or frozen anything makes enduring the weather worthwhile.

I decided that I really should review one of these low rent kakigori after having mentioned them in the Tirol polar bear chocolates review. You can see that the packaging for this cup of ice is similar to that of the Tirol candy. Also, these are a part of summer in Japan and one of the things no snack blog should avoid forever... no matter how hard one tries.

I found this particular cup of shaved ice at Inageya supermarket for 98 yen ($1.12). This one is made by Meito, a food manufacturer (established in 1953) that sells milk and milk products in addition to being a distributor for Dole in Japan. There are 200 ml. of ice in it (approximately one cup) and it's only 49 calories. That should tell you something about the substance of it.

As you can see by the cup above, this is pretty much ice with some deep pink syrup squirted into it. From the vantage point above, it looks okay. At first, I tried to scoot the flavored ice and plain ice together to mix it up, but as I got down just a bit deeper, that became rather more difficult.

Yes, apparently 98 yen won't pay for much in the way of syrup; mostly, it's just ice. Where flavor was present, it was a mildly sweet, very odd concoction which bore little resemblance to strawberry. It wasn't bad, but it almost seems like false advertising to call it "strawberry". On the occasions when I've had kakigori during festivals, this is the typical type of syrup that you get so that part is authentic.

If you want to imitate the results of this, go to your local carnival or fair and buy the cheapest, lamest snow cone you can find. Cram it in a cup and stuff it in your freezer until most of the ice bits stick together. Make sure they skimp on the syrup! If there is flavor all the way to the bottom, it's no good. Toss it out and ask for a more sub-par one.

Obviously, this was very lame and I wouldn't buy one again, nor can I recommend anyone else buy this one. To be fair, there are definitely better versions than this one around, but they are all basically the same - plain old frozen water and fake syrup. I can't understand how these things continue to take up space in freezer cases. They really do appear to cater to those with pretty low expectations. For the same price, you can buy a "Super Cup" ice cream that is far tastier.