Potato Snack Steak

Truth in advertising clearly is not an issue in Japan. Take this "potato snack". The first three ingredients are flour, oil, and sugar. It seems that there isn't much in the way of actual potato in it, though one of the ingredients is "starch" and it could be potato starch. In keeping with the Japanese trend of putting sweeteners in savory foods, there is also Stevia in this. My guess is that this is supposed to resemble a potato chip rather than actually be a potato-based food.

Since cartoon characters are used to advertise everything in Japan, you can't tell by packaging whether or not something is for adults or for kids. This item is actually for kids. It's sold in a bin full of sweets and salty snacks for children that are 27 yen (27 cents) or 4 for 99 yen ($1) in price. I picked up 4 different items for review (the others will come later) and started with this strange item.

The snacks, and other ones like them made with popcorn, rice, corn, wheat, etc., are made by a company called Izumi (いずみ邑本舗). The company has a diverse product base including noodles, sweets, sembei (rice crackers), and other miscellaneous snacks both marketed as gifts and run-of-the-mill consumer products. It's "new" by Japanese food company standards and started doing business in 1950. They've also got a handful of their own shops in the Tokai region of Japan. This is the sort of company which few people recognize as they have no signature products and most of their goods seem pretty low rent. Essentially, they have very low brand name awareness.



My expectations of anything which costs so little and is marketed toward kids are low so I didn't approach this with the idea of loving it, but simply sampling it out of pure interest. There are four large chips in the foil packet. The chips diameter is slightly smaller than the length of a ballpoint pen. When you open the package, you smell a strange smell that I'd say is a cross between a generic fried food smell and spices, with vaguely beef-like overtones.

The taste is shockingly salty for a kid's treat. It's only moderately beef-like but has a very strong finish of celery salt. The texture of these is really quite nice. They are very crispy and seem to be comprised of multiple layers of paper thin layers of whatever it is they are made of (grease and flour?). Either that or the dough used to make these forms a super thin crispy shell on either side when it's fried. The chips are a bit greasy on the outside, but don't seem to be saturated with oil. Calorie information isn't given on the packet, but the web site states that there are 76 calories in 4 chips (13 grams/.45 oz).

If I had children, I certainly would try to avoid these. They have added calcium, but are otherwise pretty bad on the nutritional front because they're just fried flour patties with seasoning. Also, because they are so salty, I have to imagine the sodium content is high. As an adult, these strike me as some of the "junkier" junk food out there. They're not bad, but eating them makes me feel more polluted than usual (and that's saying something considering the junk I review).

Yuraku Caramel Almond Latte Chocolate Bar

When I saw this bar, I thought that someone was trying way too hard to throw the candy equivalent of the kitchen sink into one itty bitty bar. There are so many parts to the name of the bar that they can't simply write it across the package. They have to stack "caramel" on top of "amond" which is on top of "choco bar" and "latte". There's even more that doesn't fit into the name. There are also wheat puffs in it.


This is another of the candy options available in some stores for only 27 yen (25 cents) that you can pick up with kid's snacks. It's a little less than half the size of most bars and is made by a company named Yuraku (ユラク). It makes a variety of sweets including cookies, candy bars, chocolates and souvenir sweets. Most of its products are pretty low rent and either blandly or badly packaged. The company's "principle" is "contributing to society through making candy." That's some lofty goal. I wonder if one tiny little bar is going to live up to that.


The bar's smell is so mixed that it's hard to pin it down. The scent is like an elixir of malt, cereal, coffee, and chocolate. The "cereal" smell comes from the wheat puffs which are present in abundance. The large white bits in the detailed picture above are these puffs and the first bite of the bar strongly reveals the cereal flavor. In fact, the puffs portion tastes exactly like the Popeye wheat puff cereal my parents used to buy for me when I was a kid. Subsequent bites bring about a stronger sense of all of the flavors. All of them, the caramel, coffee, chocolate, almonds and wheat puffs are present in an extremely tasty mishmash of flavors. The bar is crunchy, but easy to bite into and chew.

The ingredients list for this bar is huge, but the whole bar contains a good balance of sweetness and complex flavors. It's no premium bar by any stretch of the imagination, but it's very good, particularly for 90 calories and for such a low price. It's definitely something I'd have again. The lesson learned from this experience is not to conclude that something is going to be bad because it's cheap and from a company which isn't very well known. This is a tasty little bar.

Cheese Rounds (Marui Cheezu) Snack

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

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


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

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

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

Caramel Latte Crunky

Before Nestlé started releasing hundreds of varieties of KitKats in Japan (yes, there was a time when that wasn't the case), Crunky was the candy du jour for most foreign folks. How can you go wrong with a bar which resembles a Nestlé's Crunch and has a funny name? Of course, the venerable Crunky is not this version of Crunky. The old favorite is plain chocolate with crispy malt puffs. That bar, incidentally, was changed some time in the past year. They increased the number of malt puffs such that the bar has become more puff than chocolate. It has a much heavier "cereal" flavor than it used to have.


This variation on the Crunky keeps the explosion of malt puffs, but mixes them with white chocolate. If you're hoping that it's lower calorie because of the cereal aspect, you're in for some bad luck. It's 269 calories for the entire 48 gram (1.7 oz.) bar. When you give it a sniff, you smell that telltale sweetness of white chocolate with undertones of caramel and malt. The malted puffs are not excessively airy so the bar is dense, but crunchy and easy to bite into. It is called caramel latte, but I didn't detect any sort of coffee flavor and there is no coffee in the ingredients list. The caramel part was subdued and that was okay with me because a weak caramel flavor is preferable to strong, fake caramel flavors.

This is a pretty nice bar, but the explosion of malt puffs carries it close to the edge of being a cereal bar. That doesn't bother me at all. In fact, in the milk chocolate Crunky, I like it, but I'm not a strong fan of caramel or white chocolate so this is one of those things I'd nibble at very slowly and not buy again. For those who like caramel, this might be the bee's knees, but only if they aren't looking for something super rich and decadent.

Tirol Pumpkin Tart Premium

Despite the obvious Halloween motif, the Tirol pumpkin tart candies are still available in convenience stores in Japan. I'm guessing they'll vanish once they're sold out, but for now, you can still buy yourself a bite-sized vegetable-flavored treat.

My husband picked up one of these candies because he loves pumpkin. It's more accurate to say that he loves American pumpkin, not Japanese pumpkin which is called "kaboucha". There's a vast world of difference between the two since American pumpkin as sold in cans and commonly used for pies and baked goods is a careful blend of various types of squash and pumpkin to make the best taste and texture. Japanese pumpkin is just green-skinned Japanese pumpkin and doesn't always blend favorably into treats. The fact that traditional pumpkin pie spices like nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger and cloves are absent from Japanese sweets flavored with kaboucha doesn't help matters.


This tiny morsel is about an inch square and is made with pumpkin powder and pumpkin paste. It's a two-bite (well, small bites) candy and is only 48 calories. Like all of the Tirol "premium" candies, it's perfectly molded and quite attractive. Ebidebby also reviewed this and took pictures and her candy had a different picture molded into it so they come with different designs. Oddly, her candy had a rocket design and mine a house. Clearly, they aren't using molds which suit the Halloween theme of the wrapper.


The wrapping for this candy has two pieces, which seems a tad wasteful. There's a plastic outer wrapping with the illustration and a piece of foil-lined paper inside to keep it fresh.When you remove the wrapper, you smell squash and the faintest hints of caramel. Inside, there's a little round crispy cookie in the center. This adds to the "tart" aspect by making it appear as if there is a "crust" with the pumpkin "filling".

The taste of this is very much that of what is called kaboucha purin (pumpkin pudding) in Japan. It definitely has caramel overtones and a very powerful squash flavor. It's not bad, but it's an acquired taste. If you're expecting a traditional Western pumpkin treat, you're in for a shock.

While this isn't the sort of thing I'm inclined to hunt down or eat again and again, it is an interesting experience and I wouldn't mind picking one up when the season rolls around again next year. I do wish, however, that they'd toss in some spices to dilute the strong squash flavors for a more balanced and less esoteric flavor. It's surprisingly overbearing in flavor for a Japanese treat given that the Japanese on the whole favor more subtle flavors.