Apple KitKat

When I started this blog, one of the things I thought was that I'd now have a good excuse to sample all the various KitKats in Japan and that'd be just great fun. Now that I've had my way with a fair number of them, it's starting to feel like sampling them is a burden.

It's not that the basic Kitkat isn't enjoyable or that some of the variations weren't tasty, but just that some are so far-fetched that it gets increasingly difficult to work up any enthusiasm for them. The apple KitKat I'm reviewing sat in my basket of "for review" foods for over a month before I finally got to it because the idea of "Apple + chocolate" just wasn't something I expected to "work". I must note that the previous sentence is the most I've ever found myself putting quotation marks around words in one single phrase.

This particular KitKat is produced for charity, incidentally. Profits from sales of the apple KitKat will be donated to the community chest in Miyagi prefecture to help aid in rebuilding due to damage from the Iwate Miyagi Inland Earthquake. Apple was chosen as a flavor, I'm guessing, because Miyagi is well-known as a supplier of apples and Japanese "nashi" pears.


The apple KitKat is mercifully made with milk chocolate rather than white chocolate infused with flavor. The white chocolate ones seem to often be too sweet and the mixed flavor can be overbearing. As with all Japanese KitKats, it's a box of two packages with two fingers each. One package is 109 calories. The inner packaging is kind of cool in design with a bit of a pop art feel due to the posterized apple used as a graphic and the bright yellow and red colors.


The big question is whether or not you can get something for your charitable impulses if you buy one of these. When you tear open the package, you get a strong apple scent, but they otherwise look like regular KitKats. The flavor is actually quite good. To my taste buds, the mellow milk chocolate and the apple went surprisingly well together. The apple taste is very present, but it doesn't seem too "chemical". The bar is also not overly sweet. I rather enjoyed it as the apple flavor really brought to mind a nice, crispy, fresh apple. I would definitely rate it higher than some of the other fruit-flavored KitKats (like the Muscat of Alexandria variety), but not as high as some others (like Yuzu). Honestly, I could see myself buying this again if I was in the right mood.

Variety Friday: Finding Newly Released Snacks

When I first started doing this blog, I selected my snacks mainly from what was in the local markets. It was easiest just to peruse the snack isle and select something while dealing with my usual food shopping. As I continued to write posts and do research, I noticed that a lot of the newly released items that were turning up on manufacturers' web sites weren't making their way onto the shelves in my local markets. In particular, very few of the plethora of new KitKats were on display, but also a lot of "limited edition" specialty items were absent.

Guess which country this picture was taken in?

The marketing in Japan is fairly specific and all (Tokyo) shops are relatively small. That means that it's difficult to get all of a particular company's product line-up on the shelves at one establishment. Unlike the U.S. where you will see aisles full of every variety of Cheerios ever cooked up by General Mills in one place, you have to find the proper outlet for a particular item in Tokyo. If the market is geared toward older folks, children and housewives, it'll show up in the markets. If it is targeted at young women, business men, or single people, it is most likely to show up in convenience stores.

Most of the novelty flavors of popular brand names are marketed toward the bored people who work in offices and peruse convenience stores at lunch or tea time. Things like Pepsi White are less likely to show up in supermarkets and far more likely to spend their brief time on this earth in the refrigerator cases of 7-11. These flavors cater to boredom and a hunger for novelty rather than a permanent place in the stomachs of consumers. You can take a new find back to the office and share it with coworkers then compare notes on how obnoxious it is.

If you're looking for the new, weird things that are usually covered in the quirky Japan sites and news, the convenience stores, especially places like Family Mart and 7-11 are your best bet. If you're interested in more old-fashioned or daily snacking possibilities, then you're better off hitting the markets.

Black Bean Sembei (Baisen Kuromame Arare)

One thing I'm starting to realize as a result of sampling new food for this blog is that sembei is to Japanese snacking as potato chips are to American snacking. They are the blank palette on which they paint a crazy quilt of flavors just as America keeps coming up with all sorts of bizarre chip flavorings. Some of them look a bit scary and I am still not brave enough to try the ones that look like they're frosted with mucous streaks (actually, sugar, I believe), but time may give me the courage to do so.


This particular rice cracker looks like a bit of leprous amoeba, but I'm glad to say that it's actually pretty good. These are made by Kameida Seika, which is starting to become my "go to" manufacturer for tasty sembei snacks. A bag of 6 packets costs 188 yen ($1.88) and each packet is 20 grams (.7 oz.) and 91 calories. When I first saw these, I thought that they had peanuts in them, but the bag says they have black soy beans (kuromame).


The crackers are quite small and very crispy and a bit on the hard side, though not difficult to bite through. The soybeans are strongly roasted and have a nutty flavor. The crackers themselves taste like basic sembei, though they too are fairly strongly toasted. They smell a bit nutty when you first open the packet, and I think the crackers could fool someone in a blind taste test into thinking they were made with peanuts. One unfortunate aspect though is that they are rather unevenly salted. Sometimes they're immensely salty and sometimes a little bland.

These are a pretty basic cracker. The toasting (of the crackers) and the roasting (of the beans) along with the salt is where all of the flavor is coming from, but that is plenty. These are immensely savory and wonderfully crunchy. I'd definitely buy these again if I were in the mood for a nutty salted snack.

Tirol Strawberry Assortment

There's something about a multi-pack that makes the consumption of food more interesting. Perhaps it's the variety. Perhaps it's the fact that it's a lot cheaper than buying stuff individually. At any rate, this bag full of Tirol small chocolates (about 1 inch/2.54 cm square each) caught my eye at the local 100 yen shop, even though I'm not a great fan of strawberry candy.


There are 3 flavors in the bag. You get three each of strawberry jelly, condensed milk and strawberry, and strawberry biscuit. The information on the front of the package mentions that the condensed milk and strawberry one has "condensed milk sauce" in the center and "strawberry powder" mixed in with the chocolate coating. The "biscuit" one is similar to other biscuit varieties, flavored white chocolate over a bland little cracker-like cookie. The "jelly" one has, well, jelly, but it's not the kind of jelly you spread on toast. It's more like a jelly candy or gumdrop.


All of the candy has the same design and were made in the same style molds. As one might expect, they're going to be very similar in terms of the strawberry chocolate coating which they all have in common. The chocolate is very soft and cleaves easily when you bite into it. This is a common characteristic for most Tirol chocolates.


Strawberry Jelly:
This smells like milk chocolate and strawberry and has the strongest flavor. It tastes a bit like a Tootsie Roll and strawberry at first with a tart finish from the jelly. The center is a little chewy. The flavor is good and the texture quite satisfying.

Bis:
This smells like strawberry and white chocolate. At first, you mainly taste sweetness with a very faint strawberry, but if you roll it on your tongue, you get a quick hit of mildly tart strawberry. The first bite yields no cookie flavor at all, but the second (and final one given how small this is) reveals a small hint of a Twix style cookie.

Condensed Milk and Strawberry:
This also smells like strawberry and white chocolate. It tastes sweet with a hint of milky flavor, but both are mild. It grows to be quite sweet on the second bite. The texture of the creamy filling is pretty good. It's a little like butter cream frosting.

Of the three types, I liked the strawberry jam one the most. This was a bit of a surprise since I'm not generally keen on strawberry and chocolate. The flavor was the deepest and most complex. The other two are mainly nice for their textural elements and taste relatively similar to one another. If you really, really like strawberry chocolate, these might be nice to pick up, but they aren't to die for because the flavors are relatively weak. I had this bag around for a long time and it took about two months to finish 9 pieces off and I won't be buying another.

These have also been reviewed at Snack Love.

Snow Brand Salami Baby Cheese

There's a well-known sequence in the Simpsons where Homer fantasizes about "the Land of Chocolate". In fact, it's so well known among Simpsons geeks that a video game has even been built around the Land of Chocolate. If the Simpsons had originated in Japan, I think that Homer may have been merrily skipping through the land of processed cheese and drinking from cloudy fountains of fresh whey.

I have no firsthand evidence that Japanese people love soft blocks of whey-infused cheese product, but the plethora of it in markets forces me to reach the conclusion that they must. I guess it's also possible that the long shelf life means that it just sits there for months unpurchased, but is just as fresh and tasty as the day it was wrapped whenever it happens to be purchased.

Since I've been eating and reviewing a lot of sweets lately, I decided to give another "baby cheese" product a sample, particularly since my initial experience was generally a positive one. However, choosing "salami" is a little risky as marrying meat-products and processed cheese can result in very unfortunate offspring.

The ingredients reveal that there is some salami in these. You wouldn't know it to look at it though since there are only bare specks of what could be meat embedded in the tiny pale bricks. Most of the salami flavor comes from ham seasoning rather than from actual meat. Each little foil-wrapped block is 18 grams and 60 calories and is enough to top two crackers.


The cheese smells like salami and tastes very strongly of it. In fact, the salami flavor is so intense that you don't get much of the cheese flavor at all. It's more like eating mild salami in a softer format that can be melted or spread. The initial bite seems so strong that you might think it's artificial flavor, but it's actually real salami flavor. It's decent for what it is. The blocks are soft and easy to eat. It's not real cheese by any stretch of the imagination, but it's pleasant enough to eat, especially if you want a snack of some substance.

As a side note, this cheese is made by a company which has been plagued by scandals of various types. Snow Brand altered expiration dates on their butter, sold spoiled milk, mislabeled beef products, and food poisoned people with its products. Given their track record, it might seem a bit risky buying their processed cheese. However, I figure that a company that has already been caught in so many difficulties is less likely to be pulling any funny business now. Of course, I could be wrong, but this cheese hasn't had any ill effects on me. I probably won't buy this again, but not because I didn't enjoy it a little. It's mainly because I rarely crave salami flavors, and there are so many other baby cheeses waiting for me to sample them.