Random Weekend Picture 11

Yogurt drinks are very popular in Japan. Most of them are delicious, but chock full of sugar. In the display pictured above, taken at Lawson's 100 shop, there are three flavors of  yogurt drinks. On the right is "plain", in the center is "strawberry", and on the right is "mikan" (Japanese tangerine). The plain one is promoted as being fortified with Calcium and Iron and the mikan has pro-biotic qualities. I guess the strawberry one is just for plain, old-fashioned fun as it has no specific nutritional qualities listed on its label. That being said, it only has 83 calories so perhaps it is the "diet" option of the lot.

I have purchased these on rare occasions, and I do like them quite a lot, but I find sugary drinks to be less satisfying than sugary treats. They spend so much less time on your tongue than food.

Kameda Yaki Choco Snack

Every time I go to Seiyu supermarket, I find that there is a whole world of goodies that I can't find anywhere else. Their selection is bigger, but they also seem to carry a different assortment than other markets. One of the things about snack blogging is that you keep finding every shop is a little treasure trove of unexpected finds. Even when the shops all look the same, the stock is different to some extent.

These "yaki" (grilled) chocolate snack chips grabbed my attention because they aren't fried. That usually is a cue for lower calories, though I can't say that is always the case in Japan. I can't remember what I paid for them, but I think it was something in the vicinity of 130 yen ($1.40). They are made by Kameida Seika, a company which I favor for their sembei.

These chips don't smell like much, and at first, scent and taste match one another. There is a cocoa flavor there, but it's not carried to the taste buds by much. They really need more salt and some sort of sweetener. It doesn't have to be sugar, but maybe a little more Sucralose (which is one of the ingredients already). Cumulatively, the chocolate flavor starts to build up a bit, but not in the way one is accustomed to chocolate flavor as it is delivered with copious amounts of fat and sugar. It's more of a diluted flavor reminiscent of cocoa nibs at about 10% of their power.

These chips are designed as much for their wonderfully crunchy texture and low calorie nature as anything else. The entire bag is 45 grams (1.6 oz.) is only 198 calories. You could sit down with a cup of coffee and eat the whole thing with limited guilt. As is often the case with Japanese chocolate products, they're designed more toward the bitter end than the creamy, sweet experience you get with a lot of Western chocolate.

I liked these. They reminded me of diet food back home, but in a good way. I'm not sure that they would be as appealing to others as they are to me, but texture is half the battle when for a food becoming a part of my diet. If you don't judge these by their distance from a chocolate bar, and think of them more as a much, much milder chip version of an Oreo cookie's non-creamy part, you may enjoy them as well.

Asahi C's Case Fruit Nodo Ame

The Japanese market is nothing if not flooded with well-meaning products that are meant to improve your health through candy and cookies. The two big nutritional supplements are foods with Calcium or Vitamin C. For quite some time, Asahi has offered a little plastic container with tiny lemon-flavored pellets called "C's Case". Since its original inception, the brand has branched out to many products including drinks and these throat drops.

I found these at Summit supermarket in an area adjacent to my neighborhood. If you don't think that is a sacrifice, keep in mind that I had to listen to their inane ditty singing "once a week at Summit" (sung in English, no less) about a million times during my short shopping journey. They cost 198 yen ($2.13) for a 79-gram (2.8 oz.) bag. There were about 20 drops in the bag. Each candy is 9.2 calories and sugarless. Summit carried an array of sugar-free hard candies that I had never seen in my local markets so I snapped up three bags of them. You'll see the other reviews in the future at some point. I insist on sugar-free for something that I'm going to be keeping in my mouth for a prolonged period of time. My teeth really don't need a long, luxurious sugar bath, even when my throat wants something to keep it from going dry.

There are three flavors - peach, grape, and orange. I don't ask much of this type of candy except that it be sugarless and preferably have some edge to the flavor. Fruit candy is best when it has a nice little citrus bite. Here is the breakdown of these candies.

Grape: This is like the grape lollipops that you got from the doctor when you were a child (and when you were lucky that he had grape and not some gross flavor like lime), only lamer. This reminds me of when I was a child and put my lollipops in water in order to see what the water would taste like when they dissolved into it. This tastes a bit like that water. It's not bad, but it's not much of anything.

Peach: Fortunately, peach was a more flavorful offering. It was intense and had a little mouth-puckering sourness in the background. It did taste of artificial sweetener, but that's a price you pay for sugar-free candy. It actually did taste like peach, fake peach, but at least it was what you might expect.

Orange: This was my favorite of the three. If I could get a bag of only orange, I'd be happier with the whole package. The orange flavor is your classic fake candy flavor. It also had just a bit of an herbal, almost medicinal edge. One of the ingredients is "herbal extract", and I'm guessing it is only used in the orange or is most potent in this drop. 

The interesting thing about the nutrition information on this is that they tell you the numbers for the entire bag rather than each candy, as if you're going to put away the whole thing. In the 20 candies, there are 3000 mg of vitamin C (in the entire bag), .82 mg. Vitamin B, 2.7 micrograms of B12, .29 mg. of B1, .65 mg of B2, and 4.3 mg. Vitamin E. To get all of those good things, you've got to deal with Sucralose, Aspartame, and Acesulfame K.

I liked these just fine, but I wasn't crazy over them. They're definitely the sort of thing I would turn to if I had a cold and wanted to suck on something for a sore throat and give myself some extra C along for the ride. I find it hard to assign a rating because I can't say I enjoyed these enough to revisit them without a cold motivating me to do so, but I would definitely get them again if I was infected. I'm wondering if Asahi should use that as part of their marketing campaign.

Amino Calpis Zero

I knew that I would one day buy Calpis in its "straight" flavor format (as opposed to the grape which I previously reviewed) because there is no way I'm going to get out of Japan without sampling this classic beverage. Well, this isn't the "classic" form since it has been stripped of its sugary nature, but it should be a less tooth-decay-promoting equivalent.

I found this for 100 yen ($1.07) in my local green grocer, Yutakaraya, and figured it was time to take the plunge. The ingredients list is an impressive array of chemicals. The first (besides water) is Erythritol, but there's also Aspartame, Sucralose and Acesulfame K. It looks like no sweetener has been left out of the mix. It's like a party full of women who are beautiful which have all had surgical enhancements. None of it is real, but it has all appearance of being so.

The page for this product promotes it by saying that the amino acids in it will promote your basal metabolism. Amino acids are related to metabolism, and are "building blocks of protein" according to Wikipedia. So, I'm guessing that there is some benefit to this besides increasing the chances that you'll suffer some disease related to artificial sweetener consumption.

When I gave this a sniff, it reminded me of Alka Seltzer for some reason. The second sniff brought to mind a very weak version of Yakult's probiotic drink. The second impression was the one that rang true. This tastes like a partially watered down bottle of Yakult. It has the same sour notes, but they're greatly muted. The sweetness level is not muted or watered down though.

At first, I thought this was too sweet but as my taste buds got saturated and the sweetness grew muted, the yogurt-like tones shone through more prominently. I didn't think I was going to like this much and was ready to give it an indifferent rating, but I liked it more and more as I got closer to the halfway point. If I were in the mood for a yogurt drink and wanted to avoid the calories, I'd definitely go for this again. Note that I think that those sensitive to artificial sweeteners may want to avoid this assiduously.

Nagoya Bouchée (Cheese)

This may seem to be a review leftover from my week of cheese-flavored snacks, but it was simply a coincidence that my husband was given a box of cheese Nagoya Bouchée cakes around the time that I did those reviews. While this was a souvenir box from another city, these types of cakes are available in many, many shops in Tokyo. They may be qualitatively different than these, but they have the same general construction.

I looked up "bouchée" and found out that it means "small pastry casing" in French. I'm not sure if what the Japanese call a bouchée is correct according the French concept or not. I can only say that I didn't find any English-language resources for the meaning of this word that matched the cakes I see in markets, convenience stores, etc., but that could simply be a spelling difference or my less than perfect search skills. They show a variety of confections, but none like the Japanese sandwich cake that resembles a whoopie pie in basic construction.

The manufacturer doesn't have a web site, but I found a page on Nagoya-based souvenir foods which said that this box is 630 yen ($6.77) for 5 cakes. That's quite reasonable as similar individually packaged cakes are between 100-150 yen ($1.07-$1.61). As is almost always the case with souvenirs, there is no nutrition information on the box except a list of ingredients, but the calorie counts for similar cakes are about 200 per cake.

The selling point for this particular souvenir is the use of special regional eggs. The first ingredient is eggs, and 40% of the eggs used to make these cakes are special Nagoya eggs called kouchin eggs (コーチン). These eggs are supposed to have richer, darker, smoother yolks and the shells are cherry-colored. The chickens that lay them are specially bred and weigh more than average chickens with the roosters weighing up to 5 kg. (11 lbs.) and the hens up to 4 kg. (8.8 lbs.). This breed of birds is supposed to be gentle in nature and less mobile due to their large size.

The cakes are about 8 cm. (3.2 in.) in size. There is a proportionally small amount of rich, fatty creamy filling in a very dry cake. Cakes in Japan are often dry because they are made with less sugar and more fat. The ingredients list for this includes eggs (regular eggs are 60% and the kouchin eggs 40%), flour, sugar, vegetable oil, and what translates to "sugar water" in Japan but I believe is essentially like corn syrup (thought likely not based on corn). "Cheese" is far down on the list and there is also the sugar alcohol Sorbitol.

Frankly, I had low expectations of this based on the dryness of the cake, though it did smell "good" in the way that a bakery which makes cakes smells so delicious. The cake was surprisingly tasty.  It has a very nice, "developed" flavor which is ever so slightly reminiscent of a Twinkie's sponge cake. I'm guessing there is a common ingredient that brings this flavor on, but I have no idea what that might be. Though the texture is nothing to get happy about, the taste of the cake (which dominates as the filling is so small proportionally) is that of nicely sweet, good quality yellow cake. It's a cut above a lot of the mass market cakes in Japan.

The filling doesn't have much cheese flavor at all. It's sweet, and seems to be flavored with something, but it's too weak to be distinct. That was fine by me because I didn't want another cheddar-flavored sweet on my hands. Mainly, the filling adds a nice textural contrast and extra sweetness.

I really loved this because the flavor profile was so good. There may actually be something in the claim that the eggs used in these are better qualitatively than most eggs and I frankly am encouraged that the first ingredient is eggs as I think that might make the protein to carbohydrate profile on these better than your average cake. That being said, if you are sensitive to cakes that tend to run on the dry side, I couldn't recommend these for you.